Michael Brenner wrote:
> The current way percepetion is modeled is unsatisfying in a number of
> respects:
>
> 1. In reality, if people have clear view, they can see much farther than
> 10m
Yes! We also need to make sure that when an agent traverses a long path
during a single timestep they can observe things along the way.
Currently the 10m vision radius is calculated from the agents position
at the start of the timestep only.
> 2. However, they cannot see into houses even if they stand directly in
> front of it
Again, yes!
> Here is a rough draft on how these problems could be overcome:
>
> 1. A possible solution could be the computation of specific visibility
> areas for each position on the map by some simplified for of ray
> tracing. Details are open to discussion, but having the GIS information
> it is not too difficult to calculate which objects are visible from a
> certain point on the map. If we had the height of buildings (or the
> number of floors) we could even describe that one can see a big building
> behind a small one, but not vice-versa.
We can probably pre-cache a set of all fixed objects that could be
visible from each other fixed object (road, node, building). That would
take a lot less CPU time during simulation.
>
> A nice additional feature could be that visibility goes down in areas
> where there is a lot of smoke.
Perhaps a first approximation would be to reduce the maximum visible
radius if the agents are downwind of a burning building. If we sort the
pre-cached set of potentially visible objects by distance then this will
also be fast.
>
> 2. To find buried civilians, agents should go into the buildings.
> Finding the civilians should also *take time*, depending on the size of
> the building, its degree of destruction, its fieryness, the number of
> people hidden there, maybe the floor on which they were before the
> building collapsed etc.
That would be nice. Perhaps we should add a SEARCH action? Obviously
agents might be able to find civilians just by walking past, but
searching for them is a whole different activity.
Cameron Skinner.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Mon 15 Nov 2004 - 21:23:55 GMT