How to let AGVs notice each other? - anylogic

I have a path guided fleet of AGVs driving a loop with one loading and one unloading point. I want them to not come closer to each other then 20cms, so that there is queue. However in my simulation they seem to not notice each other. Sometimes 4 AGVs are interleaved. Where is the mistake?

Related

Why does the agent not go to the right attractor?

i have a fork-lifter who takes the item from the truck and stock it in the rectangular node.
The problem is that i want that the fork-lifter stock the agent according to the attractors. Instead, the operator goes in the same point every time. Why?(i did the same with another flowchart and same blocks and there is no problem, maybe a network problem?).
YOu have to manually tell it to which attractor it should go. Attractors are not actual physical spaces (that become "full" if something is stored there). They are just spaces to separate things visually.
In your process blocks, you probably did not specify the attractors correctly or did not define to move to a random attractor. But even in the latter case, you could have things being stored in the same attractor.
Two options:
Either, turn your attractors into actual agents with rectangular nodes, that you setup to be "empty/full" with state charts (faster but harder to design)
Or use the material handling library with its storage system setup, doing this for your (but this is computationally slower)

How to simulate a pickup process happening in the parking lot in AnyLogic?

I am modeling a warehouse yard where trucks arrive, get loaded/offloaded and leave the site. The complexity arises when modeling the drop trailers. Those vehicles consist of two parts: tractor and trailer. Tractor and trailer enter the yard as one entity and move to the parking lot. There, the tractor drops the trailer (turquoise colored rectangles in the picture below) and then then leaves the yard. After some time another tractor (pink colored in the picture below) comes to pick up one of those trailers. When there is no free space in the parking lot, model throws an error, because I use carMoveTo block to send it to the parkingLot. Therefore it requires additional space to move the tractor. How can I avoid this issue? In fact, I do not want that pink tractor to seize a free parking lot, but to pick up one of those trailers. I tried suppressing the error by using "on the way not found" option in the carMoveTo block, but I need to get a close-to-reality animation of the yard.
I would not advise mixing the road traffic library blocks with the Process Modelling Library (PML) Blocks, unless you really need to.
You can get near-perfect animation by making use of a network-type model and just the PML blocks. You will start by replacing your Car Move To block with just a MoveTo block
You can check the WholeSale Warehouse example in AnyLogic.
There they make use of a network diagram and PML blocks to simulation all the relative parking movements of trucks and trailers.
You can do something similar by creating the correct network and node points that indicate how a truck must move when it is parking a trailer and when it is picking up a trailer.
If this solution is not scalable and you cant draw lines, you can always simply just specify the X,Y, Z coordinates.
You might then need multiple MoveTo blocks for the entire movement or you can create some sort of loop where you give a truck a list of locations to move to, the truck will go through the loop and simply execute moving to the next location in the list, until it is done and then continue with the flow chart

Adding and removing multiple nodes efficiently, without any lag

In my game, at specific intervals, a function is called that adds multiple nodes to the scene (between 2 and 6 nodes). These individual nodes are all the same - they consist of the same blender model, same SCNCone, same spotlight and same physics bodies - (The blender model is low-poly, nothing extreme).
When it's time to call the next interval of nodes, the nodes that were called previously are removed (including their actions). This process repeats until the player has died. Now when the nodes are removed and new ones are added, it creates noticeable lag for roughly a second, and doesn't appear smooth.
I'm wondering whether there is a more efficient way to add and remove these nodes that could possibly eliminate lag? Since these nodes are all visibly the same, would cloning a node multiple times be better than re-creating the same node over and over within a for loop?
Any advice on efficiency or better practises would be greatly appreciated too.
Thanks!
Edit: Just a thought, should I have a node at every required position, and basically un-hide and give them actions when needed, and once they've done their job, fade out, put back at initial position, remove actions and hide?
This would mean I would need about 20 nodes in the scene at all times, but at least there would be no need to add any more, or remove any.
Start by turning ON statistics.
scnView.showStatistics = YES;
Click on the + at the bottom left of the screen to the stats screen.
What could be causing the lag? Quick things to check are:
1. Is the geometry too complex?
2. Are the textures too large?
3. Are there too many draw calls?
Cloning is better.
Yes, I think your idea at the end will avoid the lag. If the nodes being added are the same as the nodes being removed it will be more efficient just to hide and reset them.
If you are creating the nodes each time it is likely that is causing the lag, and you could even remove and add them from the scene but instead of creating them when needed store them in an array ready to be reused.

To use GKAgents or not

I am developing (or atleast trying to develop)
a decently big real time tactics game (something similar to RTS) using SpriteKit.
I am using GamePlay kit for pathfinding.
Initially I used SKActions to move the sprites within the Path but fast enough I realized that it was a big mistake.
Then I tried to implement it with GKAgents (this is my current state)
I feel that GKAgents are very raw and premature also they are following some strange Newton Law #1 that makes them to move forever (I can't think of any scenario where it would be useful - maybe for presentations at WWDC)
as well as I see that they have some Angular speed to perform rotations
which I don't need at all and can't really find how to disable it...
As well as GKBehaviors given a GKGoals seems to make some weird thing...
Setting behavior to avoid obstacles makes my units to joggle around them...
Setting behavior with follow path goal completely ignores everything unless the maxPredictionTime is low enough...
I am not even willing to tell what happens when I combine both them.
I feel broken...
I feel like I have 2 options now:
1) to struggle more with those agents and trying to make them behave as I wish
2) To roll all the movement on my own with help by GKObstacleGraph and a path Finding (which is buggy as well I have to say at some points the path to the point will generate the most awful path like "go touch that obstacle then reverse touch that one then go to the actual point (which from the beginning could be achieved by a straight line)").
Question is:
What would be the best out of those options ?
One of the best ways (in SpriteKit/GameplayKit) to get the kind of behavior you're after is to recognize that path planning and path following need not be the same operation. GameplayKit provides tools for both — GKObstacleGraph is good for planning and GKAgent is good for following a planned path — and they work best when you combine the strengths of each.
(It can be a bit misleading that GKAgent provides obstacle avoidance; don't think of this in the same way as finding a route around obstacles, more like reacting to sudden obstacles in your way.)
To put it another way, GKObstacleGraph and GKAgent are like the difference between navigating with a map and safely driving a car. The former is where you decide to take CA-85 and US-101 instead of I-280. (And maybe reevaluate your decision once in awhile — say, to pick a different set of roads around a traffic jam.) The latter is where you, continuously moment-to-moment, change lanes, avoid potholes, pass slower vehicles, slow down for heavy traffic, etc.
In Apple's DemoBots sample code, they break this out into two steps:
Use GKObstacleGraph to do high level path planning. That is, when the bad guys are "here" and the hero is "way over there", and there are some walls in between, select a series of waypoints that roughly approximates a route from here to there.
Use GKAgent behaviors to make the character roughly follow that path while also reacting to other factors (like making the bad guys not step on each other and giving them vaguely realistic movement curves instead of simply following the lines between waypoints).
You can find most of the relevant stuff behind this in TaskBotBehavior.swift in that sample code — start from addGoalsToFollowPath and look at both the places that gets called and the calls it makes.
As for the "moving forever" and "angular speed" issues...
The agent simulation is a weird mix of a motivation analogy (i.e. the agent does what's needed to move it toward where it "wants" within constraints) and a physics system (i.e. those movements are modeled like forces/impulses). If you take away an agent's goals, it doesn't know that it needs to stop — instead, you need to give it a goal of stopping. (That is, a movement speed goal of zero.) There might be a better model than what Apple's chosen here — file bugs if you have suggestions for design improvements.
Angular speed is trickier. The notion of agents' intrinsic physical constraints being sort of analogous to, say, vehicles on land or boats at sea is pretty well baked into the system. It can't really handle things like space fighters that have to reorient to vector their thrust, or walking creatures that can just as happily walk sideways or backwards as forward — at least, not on its own. You can get some mileage toward changing the "feel" of agent movement with the maxAcceleration property, but you're limited by the fact that said property covers both linear and angular acceleration.
Remember, though, that the interface between what the agent system "wants" and what "actually happens" in your game world is under your control. The easiest way to implement GKAgentDelegate is to just sync the velocity and position properties of the agent and the sprite that it represents. However, you don't have to do it that way — you could calculate a different force/impulse and apply it to your sprite.
I can't comment yet so I post as an answer. I faced the same problem recently: agent wiggling around the target or the agent that keeps moving even if you remove the behavior. Then I realized that the behavior is just the algorithm controling the movement, but you can still access and set the agent's speed, position and angle by hand.
In my case, I have a critter entity that chases for food in the scene. When it makes contact with the food agent, the food entity is removed. I tried many things to make the critter stop after eating the food (it would keep going in a straight line). And all I had to do was to set its speed to 0. That is because the behavior will influence not the position directly, but the speed/angle combination instead (from what I understand). When there is no goal for the entity, it doesn't "want" to change it's state, so whatever speed and direction it reached, it will keep. It will simply not update/change it. So unless you create a goal to make it want to stop, it will wiggle/keep going. The easy way is to set the behavior to nil and set the speed to 0 yourself.
If the behavior/goal system doesn't do it for the type of animation you are looking for, you can still use the Agent system and customize the movement with the AgenDelegate protocol and the update method and make it interact with other agents later on. You can even synchronize the agent with a node that is moved with the physics engine or with actions (or any other way).
I think the agent system is nice to keep around since you can use it later, even if it's only for special effects. But just as mixing actions and physics can give some weird results, mixing goal/behaviors and any other "automated" tool will probably result in an erratic behavior.
You can also use the agent system for other stuff than moving an actual sprite around. For example, you could use an agent to act as a "target seeker" to simulate reaction time for your enemies. The agent moves around the scene and finds other agents, when it makes contact with a suitable target, the enemy entity would attack it (random idea).
It's not a "one size fits all" solution, but it's a very nice tool to have.

Half scenes with static elements, other with spawn

I have 2D game, where half scene with spawn enemies and (for example) other half scene, where I want use static enemies and other elements.
I thought to create sript that after some time (for example 10 seconds), will stop spawn scripts , and run the movement of other elements.
So. Maybe there is a reasonable solution to this problem.
[UPDATE]
I need the most sensible solution of such a problem, I do not mean to do this, but how to make it better.
1) Can make static elements, which will be a certain time, just stand behind the camera, and then move ... or programmatically create static elements, over time, in advance of known locations...Or download the entire stack of elements over time.
2) Or can completely abandon this idea. A striking example is the Subway Surf, there static scenes (layout) are created in random order.
P.s. I hope I have explained my problem
Just learn to use "Invoke", it's extremely simple.
Invoke( "YourOtherRoutine", 10f );
So after ten seconds it will run the other routine. That routine could easily stop one script running, start another script running, or, whatever it is you want to do. There are tens of thousands of examples of Invoke() and InvokeRepeating() on the usual Unity forums, etc.
From your reference to Subway Surf, I assume that you want to generate static elements like the path and static trains in subway surf and non-Static elements like some moving trains. If so then I have a possible solution.
You can create pre-defined sets of elements (let say 20 or 30 set with different combination of elements) and then spawn them randomly one after another. e.g. have a look at the two reference images below.
Now, note that you might see these scenes exactly as in the images multiple times while playing the game, this is because they are pre-created, The developers behind Subway surf have created these paths and saved them as prefabs and then spawn them at different locations during game play.
You might have noticed that sometime the path is the same but the position of trains is different. This can be achieved by further creating spawn points on your path and then at runtime randomly select points on which you want to spawn your static elements.
In many cases when there are more than one gates you can pass through (I am referring to the gate in the second image). the moving trains spawns on the path of the gate you cross. Spawning the moving train can be achieved as mentioned in step two with a movement script attached to it. Regarding the question of how to know on what path to spawn there are two possible ways (that I can think of right know).
You can keep track of your players current lane and then spawn the train on that lane.
You can place separate triggers on each lane and then detect which lane trigger was triggered and then spawn the train on that lane.
For other moving trains just use the method in step 2 to spawn them but with a movement script attached.