Line Walking

General
1

Is there anyway to make agents spread slightly in their path? I am making a zombie-like game and the agents are working fine, taking the quickest path, but it looks a bit silly as seen below. Is there any non-complex method of making them spread out slightly?

2

I found a fix to this by using the AlternativePath modifier… it works well. The problem I have now is that I update my paths every 0.1 of a second since the player is always moving… This update can cause severe jitter in the paths and make the zombies do weird movements.

Someone from a previous thread posted this as a possible solution;

'Alternative path with adjusted settings seems to provide me with a decent amount of variation.

Also, in response to the jittery movement, I had the same issue and solved it by only calculating a new path from a half way point along the current path. This means the first half of the path is left untouched and the second half is recalculated, allowing a smooth follow.'

I was wondering how you would only calculate the path from half way? I see only StartPath function in the seeker script.

3

Hi

Sorry for not answering. I have been busy coding the 3.5 release of the system.
Which, when thinking about it, could be a solution to your problem. The 3.5 release includes local avoidance, which you might be able to use to separate them a bit.
My advice would be to use local avoidance, and also to add a slight randomness to the speeds of the agents, that way they will not walk on a straight line. Also you could experiment with varying the path recalculation rate depending on the distance to the player so that when they are really close, the path is updated often, but when they are far away from the player, it is updated much less often, this would have the positive side effect of using much less CPU power as well.

I think what he means is that he lets the zombie move halfway to the player, only then does he update the path.

4

My question says its been answered by someone else but I see no one? I was just wondering too… if I buy the pro version is this the same support you get?