Re: PcSteer

On Mon, 2012-08-06 at 10:01 +0100, Sam Devlin wrote:
> I do, however, still have many questions regarding 1) the overlap of
> pcPathFinder and celHPath

There have been two different works for path finding in CEL:

- It has started with the GSOC2007, where a simple A* path finding
system was implemented for basic graphs. At that time the iPcPathFinder
and iPcSteer propclasses were added (see for example the blog post of
the student on that:
http://www.crystalspace3d.org/blog/futuredib/2007/07/02/pathfinder_propclass).

- Then in the GSOC2010, a new implementation was added that is using the
R&D library. And celHPath comes from there (see eg
http://www.crystalspace3d.org/blog/leonardord/2010/07/26/hierarchical_pathfinding).

celHPath is for hierarchical path-finding, it allows to navigate among
several sectors and portals, while the R&D library has no such concepts.
So each sector is managed by the R&D library, and the celHPath allows to
build the graph of sectors and portals and navigate into it.

The work made during the GSOC2010 makes the one from GSOC2007 obsolete,
but this work was not complete. One step for example would be to update
iPcSteer in order to be able to use celHPath instead of iPcPathFinder
(although keeping the ability to use optionally iPcPathFinder might
still have some sense).

>  and 2) what does and does not work in pcSteer.

It worked quite correctly when we used it last year. But one problem is
clearly that this does not use the R&D navigation structures and that
there are usually no navigation graph loaded, therefore it only works
basically, that is, going in the direction of the target until some
objects collide and block it.

> Furthermore, it is noted in revision 3391 that some of the
> functionality of pcSteer does not work and Vincent has told me that in
> version 2.0 appsteering is non-functional (although for some reason it
> is in my branch?)

The character is supposed to do something when you press eg 's' 'f' or
'p', it was working correctly one year ago, but doesn't seem anymore for
me on your branch.

And on trunk I just get a black screen...



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