Shmup AI

[ac3raven]

So I'm making a top-down space shooter and I am trying to figure out a good way to put lots of enemies on screen at once that fly around in a semi-organic fashion. I don't want to manually put paths down. I'm thinking that boids will work beautifully for this, but what is the best way to make boids?

If you have a better idea than boids or manual paths, let me know.

[mobichan]

What exactly is a boid? And in general, you are going to need to control the movements of enemies per type, either through using a path movement, vector movement or a custom movement.

[ac3raven]

A boid is:
http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/

It seems easy to program, especially in fusion.

The reason I really don't want to do a path is because that would require A LOT of paths, because there are so many enemies passing by the frame at any given time, and what if I have a single type coming from multiple directions and moving on different paths? Paths seem to be a very arduous and ineffecient way to do enemies.

What exactly do you mean by vector and custom movement?

[mobichan]

Sorry, boids seems a bit over my head. But I would kind of assume they will be a bit out of your reach in MMF2 if you have to ask what vector and custom movements are.

And to clarify, vector movement is one of MMF's built in movement types that simply moves objects in a direction at a constant speed with gravity. A custom movement is one you make yourself that controls an object's position based on math equations and code.

Anyone else know how he might handle boids?

[Dynasoft]

It requires complex interactions between duplicates of the same object, something MMF2 is notoriously bad at...

[Dynasoft]

I think this post should be in this thread too.

[arfa]

I just had a quick look at the boid link and it reminded me of Nivrams "basictowerdefenceexample" in as much as it detects multiple object proximity. I used a version of it to do a variety of proximity related responses.

Just a thought

[ac3raven]

It requires complex interactions between duplicates of the same object, something MMF2 is notoriously bad at...

Yeah, I ran into this issue a while back for a grappling hook system I was working on. I just had a look at the example vector movement file, and the "follow the leader" example is pretty close to what I was looking for.