Book Image

Learning Game AI Programming with Lua

By : David Young
Book Image

Learning Game AI Programming with Lua

By: David Young

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning Game AI Programming with Lua
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Getting Started with AI Sandbox
Index

The path information


Now that we have generated paths from the navmesh, there are additional accessor functions that can retrieve useful information about the paths themselves. Once we've assigned a path to an agent, we can retrieve the nearest point on the path the agent is close to.

Typically, the nearest point on the path will be very close to the agent's current position, but our agents can navigate away from their paths due to steering. Finding the closest point on our agent's path can be useful in order to know the direction our agent has to move in order to return to its path:

local nearestPoint = Agent.GetNearestPointOnPath(
    agent, agent:GetPosition());

Once we know a point on the path, we can perform an additional query to find out how far that point is from the start position. The distance returned from the Agent.GetDistanceAlongPath function is not the Euclidean distance between the two points but is the actual traveled distance along the path to the point:

local distance = Agent...