Research Assignment - The Tutorial

Basic AI movement in sandbox2 for Crysis from Geoff Ashmore on Vimeo.


This tutorial is aimed at those who have a fairly good understanding of sandbox2 for Crysis, including a basic understanding of the Flowgraph system.

References: 

user - khalan, AI follow http://www.incrysis.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=13386

ASSIGNMENT02 SUBMISSION

Through the porosity lens from Geoff Ashmore on Vimeo.

Tutorial Subject

My tutorial subject will be on basic AI movement. The three main elements of AI movement I will cover is using tagpoints, paths and making AI follow the player. This will incorporate the use of the Database to load libraries, the AI objects including tagpoints and paths, and the Flowgraph including the nodes of:

AI:AIGotoSpeedStance
AI:AIFollowPathSpeedStance
LocalPlayer
Entity:EntityPos
Logic:Any

Porosity Lens Brief

My porosity lens will focus on gaining an understanding of how people move throughout a certain space. Movement is a dynamic and, more importantly, an ephemeral occurrence. That is, movement happens constantly, but once the movement has occurred, most record of it is lost with the exception of footprints, for example.

My porosity lens will use 'breadcrumbs' to monitor movement within the environment. These breadcrumbs provide a way of monitoring movement after the event has occurred, containing information such as direction, distance and speed.

The second part of my porosity lens will investigate how different areas of an environment are used in different ways. My way of demonstrating this will be through a high-rise building. Each floor will, when entered by a character, glow a certain brightness depending on how many have visited it previously. This will show the volume of use each floor recieves.

Environment

This is the initial environment I have developed for EXP02:

The environment will be a work-site. I believe this provides a good opportunity to best display the Porosity lens.

Research Idea

My initial idea for a topic of research for the research assignment is to do with basic AI movements.

This could include the FlowGraph nodes:

AI:AIGoto
AI:AIGotoSpeedStance
AI:AIFollow
AI:AIFollowPath
AI:AIFollowPathSpeedStance

I believe this would be a good topic for this research assignment as it is a topic which I have found difficult to master and noticed a great lack in help when trying to get these interactions to work properly. The tutorial would focus on basic movements and interactions, and not delve into anything more complex.

Very cool crysis mod

Flowgraph node videos

Material Param. & AIGotoSpeedStance:




Flowgraph for the glow material parameter

Flowgraph for the AI movement

Proximity trigger - Light:

EXP02 flowgraph nodes

Flowgraph node 01: Entity: ProximityTrigger

Triggers an event when a chosen entity is within a certain range.

Flowgraph node 02: Entity:MaterialParam

Change parameters of the materials applied to entities, such as glow amount, colour and opacity.

Flowgraph node 03: AI:AIGotoSpeedStance

Make an AI go to a certain position, at a certain speed.

What I hope to do with these flowgraph nodes, either in combination or in isolation, is to create an environment in which AI characters move around at random. Their movements will trigger lights set up within the space which will turn on and change hue depending on how many AI characters are within each trigger. This will create a 'heat map' of the environment, and essentially show a map of the movement and density of people within a space.

EXP01 FINAL SUBMISSION

Filefront link:

http://www.filefront.com/17247980/3332083.zip

3D Warehouse link:

http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=f6f4a3cc59bac3e72c1488b2f7948eb6&prevstart=0

e_particles command

The command e_particles (1, 0) turns particle effects off. This means that, during an explosion, the fireball which is normally seen is turned off, leaving only the result of the explosion.

Particle effects on:

Particle effects off:

As my hypothesis will deal with the result of the explosion only, the particles off will be used as it does not obstruct the view of the exploded objects, and has a cleaner look.

Zero Gravity Explosion Test

I'm experimenting with zero gravity explosions as I believe they will show a great contrast in how the exploded objects 'navigate' the porosity of the structure.

In Open Space:



Within the porous structure:

Explosive Hypothesis

Explosions in real-time interactive environments provide opportunities to reveal the underlying structures of pieces of architecture. By exploding the internal components of a piece of architecture, the core, porous structure is revealed.

Interactive Opportunities

In this experimentation, I used trackview to create a platform on which I recorded the following video. I plan to use this method to film several panning shots of the explosions, including some titles as in this video.

Preliminary terrain

Explosion test

Explosion Test01 - C4:



Explosion Test02 - C4 + Barrels:

Interesting Landscape

From ARCH1101, my EXP3 valley landscape including movable architecture (pictured half-way through movement).