Pathfinding in Ember

I've recently done some work on adding proper pathfinding to Worldforge. For this I've chosen the Recast/Detour library. While this approach, using voxel rendering to create navmeshes from arbitrary geometry, is both complex and resource expensive, I'm convinced it's absolutely required to allow us to properly support the dynamic and changing worlds in Worldforge.

I've done the initial implementation in Ember, mainly because it's easier to visually debug. But the main benefit will come from integrating this work into Cyphesis, so that it can control AI movement.
This is an area sorely in need of improvement. See, currently there's no path finding or obstacle avoidance at all for the AI characters. The result of this is that NPC characters always move in a straight line towards their target, causing them to inevitable become stuck on other entities. No good. No good.

With proper path finding and obstacle avoidance we can instead implement more advanced AI behaviour.

Navigation preview

Here's a short preview of the work I've been doing the last couple of days. I'm using Recast/Detour to implement proper navigation in Worldforge, first in Ember and then in Cyphesis.

Ember 0.7.2 binaries for Linux and Windows available

We now have binaries for Linux and Windows available for Ember 0.7.2.

They can be downloaded from here:
Linux (64 bit)
Linux (32 bit)
Windows

Worldforge taking part in Google Summer of Code 2014

Once again Worldforge has had the good fortune to be selected as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2014!

This is an awesome opportunity for students to both get more involved in the project as well as get a sweet gig for the summer. If you’re a student reading this, waste no time getting over to the GSoC site and read up on how all of this works. Then swing by the Worldforge wiki to read up on how this all works specific to Worldforge. Don’t hesitate to contact us through our various channels.

As previously we’re also acting as an umbrella organization for our friends in the Ryzom and CEGUI projects.


Here is a video showing off student work from previous year, to perhaps serve as an inspiration.

Ember 0.7.2 released

The Worldforge 3d client Ember version 0.7.2 has been released and is now available from the WorldForge download site.
Ember is a client for the WorldForge project. It allows you to both play in and edit virtual worlds.This release includes a totally revamped terrain engine as well as various improvements to both game play
and authoring.

• Revamped and improved terrain engine.
• High level detail terrain materials.
• Improvements to authoring.
• Various bug fixes.

This version can be downloaded from the sourceforge download site, at the following locations:

• ember-0.7.2.tar.bz2
• ember-media-0.7.2.tar.bz2

At this time we do not provide precompiled packages.
Note that if you compile from source, you will need to install the content of ember-media-0.7.2.tar.bz2 to PREFIX/share/ember/media or use the “make releasemediarsync” make target.
More information can be found at the Ember site.
All bug reports should be posted at the Launchpad.

Eris 1.3.23 released

Eris version 1.3.23 has been released and is now available from the WorldForge download site. Eris is the WorldForge client-side session layer. This release is a minor release which primarily fixes some bugs and adds support for the new entity reference Atlas format, which is vital for proper import and export support.

• Support for the new entity reference Atlas format.
• Various bug fixes.

Source code can be downloaded from the following locations:

• Source Code .bz2
• Source Code .gz