Collision Avoidance Library Menge discussion.

[pgruenbacher]

This is a discussion thread for using Menge library with godot. It's a very good collision avoidance library from what I can tell. I've included two demo videos. One is a demo of using it from within godot, the other is a video of the collision test examples being run. As you can see the library and collision avoidance in general is a much better way of doing agent-to-agent collision and navigation when certain scales are needed. Think of games like RTS, total war, sim city pedestrians, or anything that involves mobs of enemies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBjK3BzUu5A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQEJqnopt60

At the moment I'm just writing my own custom module that links to the Menge third-party library. I'm curious from this dicussion thread if we think that Menge CrowdSim would be a valid thirdparty to be included and mantained in the godot repo, or if it is something that should be a separately maintained module repo.

This is related to this large discussion on engine bloat and addon bloat.
#19486
Personally, I'd like to see Menge in thirdparty godot. I suppose it could be a compile option so that mobile developers can avoid bloat, but I think agent avoidance is a very nice standard out-of-the-box feature to have. Optional addon downloads with c++ libraries is not ideal (or at least I haven't experienced a good workflow of it yet).

[Calinou]

Optional addon downloads with c++ libraries is not ideal (or at least I haven't experienced a good workflow of it yet).

Unless I'm mistaken, if you're using GDNative and are releasing pre-built binaries for each platform, users should be able to download and use them without having to do anything special (they don't even need to install a C++ compiler).

There are many ways to automate binary releases; continuous integration platforms such as Travis CI are often used for this.

[pgruenbacher]

@Calinou you know of any good example plugins that do this? Fwiw I'm not using GDNative for my c++ code, I'm just recompiling a fork of godot with my custom modules cause I prefer referencing the codebase itself instead of the C bindings.

[pgruenbacher]

@reduz I'm guessing you'll want this as a plugin instead of as a standard thirdpary but I think you'd be interested in the 2nd video. It's 13,000+ unit movement and navigation on a heightmap at 60 fps. The Menge library uses all available cores when processing. There's a Behavior state machine being used too so the behavior can be made to be pretty complicated other than just navigating while still taking advantage of the parallelism and kd-tree being made.

[pgruenbacher]

I'll reopen this discussion when I have a better demo to get more attention.