Pathfinding: what to do?

Scripting Issues
#1

This maybe long winded but i wanted to be very specific.

Ok so I am looking at pathfind and point and click movement. I have been looking over the various path finding prebuilds like A* and Pandasteer. My problem is that A* isnt going to work for the style game im building. Pandasteer looks lie it would work great it has a few issues with its pathfinding, but ive already solved a few (Like the actor getting lost in the forest). And it has a built in point and click system!! My problem here is that I tried to use this in my game and it dosnt appear to like geomip terrain. It likes its terrain system which I am trying not to use as my terrain is already linked to alot.

Now that you know the background lets get to the real question and info part.

I need pathfinding with point and click from what I can tell, waypoint pathfinding would be best. I have managed to get the coodindates of where my mouse clicks on the terrain but now I need to move the character while avoiding obsticles (that have yet to be put in place). Now I understand alot about collisions and will def use the Panda collision system but what I can’t figure out is how to map the path and make my character walk it. which is pretty much all of it lol.

I tried looking at the code of Pandasteer but due to the plugin system it jumps around alot. I have been searching the forums alot for this and there dosnt seem to be too much on this type of Pathfinding. Now maybe I am searching the wrong things (Pathfinding, point and click, waypoint and every varient of that), but from what I can see there isnt much on this around so if someone could help me out with setting this up, or point me to a good well documented snippet (I work better from example), or knows a different system I can impliment that works for geomipterrain, or at least can point me in the right direction to get this working with pandasteer.

I would like to say in advance thank you to everyone who replies to this post as when it comes to this I am completely lost! If you need more info or need to see code let me know and I’ll be happy to answer or show you!

#2

Does Pandasteer even have Pathfinding? I’m almost certain it only has local collision avoidance. And these are two very different things.

As far as I understand, and correct me if I’m wrong, you think that A* won’t fit your needs not because you want to use some other algorithm (like Dijkstra or whatever), but because you need your characters to avoid dynamic obstacles, right? If that’s the case, than you still, most probably, do need pathfinding. At least if you have some buildings, lakes or other things like that on your map, that the characters are meant to avoid walking into. So what you really need is pathfinding (and thus A* in most cases) with local collision avoidance.

Thus I’d suggest you look closely into the (recently finished to version 1.0) PandaAI system. Here’s the link -> etc.cmu.edu/projects/pandai/

I’m yet to try it empirically, because I have other development stuff on my head right now, but it seems to have everything you’ll need.

Just give it a try. There’s a forum thread about it (there’s a link on the website), so in case you have any problems you can just ask there, and I’m sure the PandaAI developers will help.

#3

Ok I’ll check it out but I still am not sure this is what I need. As i dont really need anything you stated (buildings trees and other stationary objects need to blow up and then be able to walk through that area not sure if i can do that with A*)

But i guess what i meant Is that I am having some issues in using collision avoidance to make a point and click system for walking… like pandasteer (willing to use different code) but one that allows me to use geomip terrain.

Edit: Wow they have come far since i first saw that site! they now have a few things i can use. Although I dont know how easy its going to be I think I can make it work! Thanks for showing me this as I had almost forgot about it.