If you want to keep up with technical developments you can go to user group meetings, read forum posts, read the wiki or go and read Nalates Urriah’s blog. I like the latter as it’s a good central repository. This week Nalates has been keep us up to date with the upcoming Pathfinding features, you can read the blog post here.
Pathfinding will help prims navigate around a sim all on their own, this has potential for non player characters, such as pets, barmen (and maids), ambience, bouncers and such like. Pathfinding alone won’t make this happen, as Nalates points out animations will still need to be used but pathfinding is a big step in the right direction of making this more easy to get going.
There’s an alpha overview on the Wiki, which being alpha means we shouldn’t get too excited just yet. The overview informs us of some of the commands and their LSL counterparts. There is also a Pathfinding Alpha Release wiki page which tells us that there will be a development viewer for this, but it has not yet been released. The feature will appear on Aditi first.
For now let’s chew over those commands so we can see the sort of potential this feature may bring:
- Evade – run away from a specified object or avatar. LSL llEvade
- Flee – Attempt to get a specified distance from a specified location. LSL llFleeFrom
- Navigate – Move to a specific location. LSL llNavigateTo
- Patrol – Move through a path defined by a set of patrol points. LSL llPatrolPoints
- Pursue – Chase a specified object or avatar. LSL llPursue
- Wander – Randomly move around a specified distance from a specified central point. LSL llWanderWithin
The links to the LSL commands give examples and more details on what these tools can do, they look like they are potentially extremely useful, hopefully when we get the project viewer and start playing about with the tools more, it will make even more sense as well as pointing out the limitations, but I’m encouraged by this.