hello, that’s a very interesting and deep topic, i’ve done some stuff in this direction and want to share my thoughts.
what i’d love to see implemented:
in my opinion a aStar with a grid or a node system would be the most important thing panda is missing. as it has already been mentioned python “sucks” at low levels, aStar makes a lot of such simple actions. if possible it should be run as thread. (something like: http://www.nouser.org/PMW/pmwiki.php/Portfolio/SparetimeAStar , if you want the code i can dig it out)
a very interesting part is pathfinding mesh generation. (http://www.ai-blog.net/archives/000152.html) , together with a good a-star this solves a lot of higher priority problems in AI.
queuing in aStar is a interesting topic as well. multiple actors navigating the same mesh without interferencing is quite hard to do afaik. (never really tried it myself)
things to consider when working on seek/flee/arrival/…:
while i’ve never tried it myself, i’ve read that “Potential Function-Based Movement” can do pretty much all of the movement styles you mentioned. The book “AI for Game Developers” from O’Reilly mentions this one after the flock algrithm.
another thing that has a big influence on the topics you want to cover is if you are going to do this in 0 grip (space game) or in earthlike motions. leader follow is quite a bit more complex (and interesting) in space then if you try following a human (you want to archive the same velocity vector, not the same position). while the “0-grip” method can easily be used for position archiving methods it’s impossible the other way. i’ve implemented this in: http://www.nouser.org/PMW/pmwiki.php/Portfolio/BachelorEliteWars but the code may be not that good to read.
other topics:
fuzzy logic and neural networks are another big topic in ai. but neural networks dont seem to be the topic you want to cover. fuzzy logic however seems to be a possible way in behavior control of ai characters.
genetic algorithms are another interesting part, but it’s quite easy to implement, it’s more important to have good selection mechanisms. im using genetic algrithms in my current master project.
inverse kinematics could be viewed as some kind of pathfinding. a very interesting topic and cool if panda had this. i’ve seen some works that make ragdolls to behave human like (protecting the head while falling) that goes into a similar direction.
i already said this, but ai for game developers covers most of the topics you and i mentioned.
