3D Maze

[elapj]

hi

for my project i need to create a 3d maze that an object can move around. just interested to see how you guys might approach it ?


im thinking of designing the maze in blender then importing into irredit as an octree , then loading into my code, something simular to the collision or .irr tutorial .

do you think this is the best way ? any thoughts welcome

cheers

andy

[rogerborg]

Since this is an academic project, it might be more interesting to create it programatically. You could swipe some source code from here.

That would allow you to create many different challenges for your 'bot without extra modelling effort, and by choosing a specific srand() seed, you could recreate any specific maze.

Rendering the maze in Irrlicht would simply be a case of adding quads to a mesh buffer, and you can also create a triangle selector from the resultant mesh. All very civilised.

[elapj]

cheers

thanks for the idea


as this is a final year of my degree project im looking for something with a little better graphics . evently a self learning robot algorythm with control the robot not me with my mouse etc.

does anyone elso have any ideas ??

andy

[JP]

I did basically the same thing for my final year project at Uni and had a maze generator algorithm to randomly make a maze for my AI agents.

Don't worry about graphics, it's really not important and you won't get much credit for the graphics, it's all about the algorithmic complexity really. I was told that you get roughly half the marks for software engineering and half the marks for algorithmic complexity (how much effort you put into your algorithms basically). And basically you pretty much cover the software engineering side of things just by doing a game but it's really hard to get the algorithm marks when doing a game.

You can get really badly carried away with graphics on a game and not spend enough time on the gameplay and other important things, such as AI.

If you want to check out what i did then i might be able to send you my project. After i'd graduated Uni i then turned the project into a FPS game, rather than just AI agents running around a maze with you observing, which you can see on my website (Johnny 5 Must Die, the download's broken, drop me a line if you want to check it out)

[bitplane]

Since this is an academic project, it might be more interesting to create it programatically. You could swipe some source code from here.

Nice links, bookmarked for future reference, thanks

[rogerborg]

does anyone elso have any ideas ??

I have opinions.

I suggest that unless your requirements specify a simulated 3d environment, that you forget about 3d rendering/collision detection and implement the simplest visualisation that demonstrates your underlying algorithms.

[Frosty Topaz]

If you're dead set on 3D you can still avoid having to do collision detection by just making the maze out of cubes aligned on a grid (similar to the original Wolfenstien 3D). It'll look reasonable and you can keep wall positions in a table.

[JP]

Yeah that's basically what i had going on for my AI agents in the maze, they just moved in grid-based fashion and so they never actually had to worry about walls as the grid telling you info about the maze told you if you could exit a square in a certain direction.