Bone Crush - 1 - The project and spherical pathfinding.
I have a huge passion for developing AI. There is something really fascinating with watching AI you have built wonder around and interact with their environment.
After having some downtime from some projects I thought I’d keep my development momentum and start a passion project. My project, code name BoneCrush, is the result.
The goal for Bone Crush is to create an application that sits on a server that I can connect via a client application on a website. Bone Crush will be a planet where users can watch creatures live and learn on the planet. Currently the user interaction is undecided but the current main design focus is to simply have different creatures roam, look for food, and survive the planet. In the future I’m thinking of allowing users’ to adopt creatures which they can follow the journey of throughout their life time on the planet. Similar concept to Tamagotchis / Digimon. My focus for the development is to tackle new ideas and methods I haven’t done before. As the project is a passion project I have no due date or deadlines which really helps.
My development approach has already seen me investigate directions and change my approach a few times. After completing my basic networking and project structure I dived straight into my AI and pathfinding. At first I created a world on a flat surface, but after recent research I learnt that the world isn’t actually flat! It’s a sphere. Crazy stuff hu! So I decided I would create my world on a sphere instead.
The change from a flat surface to a sphere saw that I had to rebuild my navigation and A Star system. I decided I would first approach my navigation by creating a spherical grid, using a icosphere and subdividing it enough times to have an even distribution of vertices which I would then use as grid points. This approach took a while to complete as there were a few hurdles with finding my nearest neighbours but I eventually did it! The video with this post is showing my AI navigating the sphere using my spherical A Star and my spherical grid.
Knowing me, after completing my spherical grid / spherical A Star pathfinding I decided that it wasn’t good enough. I wanted to create tunnels and overpasses on my planet both of whch the spherical grid wasn’t going to be the right solution to my problem (thank god this is a passion project). Instead I decided I was going to create my own navmesh instead.
More posts on Bone Crush to come.
