LIFE with Recast/Detour
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I sent this mail earlier today to the Recast/Detour mailing list.
Hello,
I'm working on LIFE, the new AI middleware MASA is showcasing at the GDC next week. I am sending you this email to announce that LIFE uses Recast/Detour as its built-in navigation solution. I’d also like to explain how and what we will contribute to this great project. We are committed to open source our development on Recast/Detour for the benefit of the community.
LIFE aims at providing a solution for behavior authoring and execution for games and simulations alike. It provides a 3D sandbox where behavior designers can preview, test and debug their work, hence our need for navigation. We ruled out rebuilding a system from scratch, something we had experience doing, and decided to integrate Recast/Detour, thus benefitting from the lean and robust (and, to be honest, awesome) software Mikko and all the contributors have built.
Recast/Detour offers two mature features: navigation mesh generation and queries. but beyond that, we needed a full-fledged reactive navigation solution to make our little simulated autonomous pals able to gracefully move around, aware of their neighbors and environment. We are building this system from the existing DetourCrowd and will release it publicly in the next months as a part of Recast/Detour and under the same permissive licence.
Our first goal is to provide a versatile framework for navigation behaviors thus allowing developers and scientists to develop, test and use their algorithms. We plan to include well-tested and efficient behaviors for path following, collision avoidance and group navigation. We hope these new features will benefit to the whole community and also help it grow.
We are looking forward for your comments and questions. Stay tuned for the upcoming release!
Thanks again to Mikko and the other contributors for making such a great piece of software.
PS. I'll be at the GDC next week, both at conference (including the AI summit) and at the exhibition on booth #1936 with colleagues to present what we've been working on for 1 year: MASA LIFE. I hope you'll be many to come have a look!
PPS. On the booth, you'll be able to play a small top-down tank shooter we've developed using LIFE for AI, it's awesomely fun!