ABM Archives - Digital Urban

15,000 Agents: A* Pathfinding

Andy — Tue, 14 May 2013 08:54:11 +0000

Games engines such as Unity are the perfect platform for agent based modelling, they allow a combination of 3D urban cityscapes and navmeshes/grid graphs/point graphs and local avoidance systems. The A* Pathfinding project features an array of techniques for rapid pathfinding or AI development using a low memory footprint.

Agents in Unity

We have only started exploring the possibilites but the results are intriguing, below features a clip of 15,000 agents using local avoidance, the number could be considerably increased using multiple machines:

A* Pathfinding is available in free and pro versions, it is well worth checking out, we have just upgraded to the pro….

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Unity Traffic System – City Traffic

Andy — Mon, 13 May 2013 12:05:01 +0000

Creating a sandbox style traffic system in Unity is a challenge. As our previous posts have shown agents can use NavMesh and calculate shortest paths but the hit is high on processing which in turn limits the number of agents in a scene. Sander van der Vegte is a multidisciplinary game developer who for the past 12 years has fortunate enough to make a living creating games, part of his current development process is a city traffic game and thus finding ways for natural behaviour while maintaining a low processing requirment.

Unity City Traffic

The clip below is a recording of an autonomous traffic system. Cars drive around while aware of crossings and other vehicles. When something is blocking their path, they will stop. If it takes too long, they will back up and look for another path, the basic ruleset allows for humorous situations:

Traffic system from Sander van der Vegte on Vimeo.

Within the development the user is able to click on a car to take it over while falling off the edge triggers the random camera again.
It is well worth heading over to http://sandervandervegte.nl/ to view his other projects and to keep up to date on City Traffic.

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Urban Ball – CityEngine, Unity and Agent Based Modelling on the iPad

Andy — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 12:14:26 +0000

CityEngine combined with Unity and a tablet – iOS requires a developers account, Android simple needs the 30 days Unity trial – allows city wide models to run with a touch based interface.

Urban Ball – CityEngine and Unity on iOS

We have used our recent work on Unity and Agent Based modelling to create a simple app called ‘Urban Ball’. Development time so far is around a couple of days so the route from city modelling through to iOS app is remarkably short. Via some tweaked physics and a touch interface linked to a to a ball (the target) we have a simple agent based model on the iPad.
The movie below shows the app so far:
We have been impressed with the rapid development path using Unity and the ability of the iPad to run city wide models complete with agents. Arguably we have completed a proof of concept here, in the next few weeks we will explore how much further we can go – perhaps to release our first free iPad/Android app….
See also – Trail Rending of Agents with NavMesh, Physics, Unity and CityEngine, Augmented Reality City Table Top – Unity, CityEngine and Vufoira and Shortest Path Modelling and NavMesh in Unity and CityEngine.

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