Flowfields-demo

A basic demo for flowfield pathfinding

demo.mp4

This is a very limited demo for concurrent flowfield pathfinding I did in a couple of days using Go, loosely based on the guides from https://howtorts.github.io/

Its current limitations are:

• There are no physics (velocity, collisions, etc.): every agent moves exactly one cell per movement, based on its current cell neighbours and other agents which may be occupying these cells.

• There are no predictions and look-aheads, since there is a hard constraint which mandates that no two agents can occupy the same cell at any given time.

• The structure is designed for debugging rather than performance and usability:

  • The solution is inherently concurrent but forces each agent to synchronize with a barrier in order to coordinate their movements and render them.
  • Each agent has one flowfield irregardless of other agents who may have the same objective, and also share a shared flowfield for tracking other agents. These two structures should be joined together in order to not duplicate data.

• The obstacle functionality is implemented, but not tested.

Usage

Compile it from the root directory with:

go build main.go

Or simply run it with:

go run main.go

There are some optional parameters:

-agents int
    number of agents to start. (default 1)
    
-debug 
    log movements of each agent in their respective files.
    
-tps int 
    number of movements per second to do. (default 4)

Upon running it, a grid will show up. Each agent is represented by a Go's gopher, and the cells will be colour coded such as:

• If the cell is yellow: It has been crossed by an agent as part of its desired path
• If the cell is orange: A cell which was part of the path of an agent has not been crossed, in order to avoid colliding with another agent.
• If the cell is red: The cell is the objective for an agent
• If the cell is green(ish): The cell is an objective reached by an agent. Upon reaching it, the gopher will disappear, allowing other agents to cross it.