Suggestion for new Pathfinding Behaviour

Just a thought.

Would it be better if this were split up into two different behaviors?

A path finder, and a path movement?

A delayed parenting system would be neat.

A few of the game engines I have worked on they have a feature called "boids" or "flocking".http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids

It would be extremely useful for fish or birds (I think boid is a joke name for how some Americans pronounce birds).

It is also useful for moving large numbers of objects like groups of infantry for a Real time strategy game (RTS) or moving a bunch of mobs in a tower defense game with dynamic paths and dynamic objectives.

One of the engines has a promotion system to choose the alpha boid ,(the one that all the others will seem to follow). After the alpha gets destroyed, it would choose the next boid to take over the overall flock's path.

If it is not too much trouble can we have something like this too?

jojoe Check out this custom plugin. :)

jojoe Check out this custom plugin. :)

Thank you so much :)

I added a bit in that thread too about the alpha system.

Maybe these are dumb suggestions because they are too easy, too complicated to implement or they can be done actually(I suck at programming :D) but still:

1) It would we awesome if one can make the sprites/objects don't collide/overlap with others instances of the sprite/object. Making the sprites themselves obstacles or solids doesn't work (don't know why)and while the flock idea has some nice uses it wont help if someone wants his individual rts tanks going to different places. (*)

2) This is harder probably: if the destination is unreachable why don't make the sprite/objects go to the nearest empty/reachable place instead. Something like "find nearest path to X,Y"

(*) Using "on collision" + wait 4 the further instance it gets a little better but they still overlap randomly and sometimes even trespass solids.

I suggest the "not overlapping" feature for pathfinding must become a top 1 priority =P

would love a proper solution for this, you guys do a great job with this kind of thing <img src="smileys/smiley12.gif" border="0" align="middle" />