Assignment_B1

Basic Notes About the Game:

• In order to move the agents, you must “esc” out of game mode and then click your left mouse key to select it and “esc” again and use your right mouse key to set the destination.
• To select multiple agents, you must choose all the agents one by one and “esc” between each agent selection and then choose your destination.
• Camera Controls: S (zoom out), W (zoom in), A (left), D (right), Space (up), Shift (down), H (home)
• Dynamic Obstacle (Pink) can be controlled with arrow keys
• Dynamic Obstacles (Green) move automatically
• There are 3 levels and are all walkable by the agent itself
• The agents are the smaller capsules and the adversarial agent is the large green one.

Braking Mechanisms & Obstacle Avoidance:

• We used the agent prefab stopping distance to ensure that all agents when moved came to a natural stop. This allows the agents to not push against each  other when all of the agents are moving towards the same target. 
• The NavMeshAgent has a component in the inspector called Obstacle Avoidance. This allows the agents to avoid all NavMeshObstacles. The obstacles don’t have to be carved because Obstacle Avoidance ensures that even though the agent won’t plan for the obstacle in its’ pathfinding, it will recognize it and go around it once it gets closer to it.
• A carved obstacle is integrated into the nav mesh itself so whether it’s stationary or moving, the agent is always aware of the obstacle once the nav mesh is created. This allows the agent to include the obstacles during pathfinding so it will find efficient paths around it. However, if an obstacle is not carved, the agent will only include it in its path finding once it gets close to it. This causes a great deal of bouncing around for the agent (especially if the obstacles are constantly moving) in order to reach their selected target.  
• Carving is really efficient when you only have a couple obstacles because they will accurately depict the mesh in real time for your agents, however it can be really inefficient with a lot of obstacles because it happens in real time which is inefficient. You want most of your nav mesh to bake before run time. If  you make all your obstacles carved, it won’t be efficient for your game as most of it runs at run time, however if you make most of them not carved then the agents don’t have an accurate lay of the path they need. It’s best to make stationary obstacles as not carved and dynamic obstacles as carved as those will be the ones unpredictable to the agent during run time.

Extra Credit Attempts

• We created the large green capsule as our Adversarial Agent. We needed it to act like an agent and as an obstacle so we could move it like the other agents, but have it be an obstacle when it’s stationary and when it’s moving. To do this we create a 3D Capsule Game Object that has a NavMeshAgent and NavMeshObstacle Component. The object is connected to a script that gives the  code to move like any agent does (using ray cast). The one thing we had to change from the other template agents was to remove the start function that got the public NavMeshAgent component. We did this because we don’t want it to always be an agent - especially not at the start. We want it to only activate the script in the Update function if the capsule is selected in an effort to be moved. For the Object NavMeshObstacle  component we set the radius to 2 because it caused issues for the agents that avoided it if it was too high. We also made it a carving obstacle because we made it dynamic when we physically move it. When we move it, we want to ensure that the other agents continue to avoid it during its path to the destination. The adversarial agent works pretty well !