ABSTRACT
This chapter exhibits that steering a formation to end in a specific place and direction, with the use of some simple linear algebra, is not difficult. By calculating two steering circles based on the formation’s current position and the destination position, it’s possible to generate a path for the formation to follow that will ensure that the formation will never need to make turns sharper than it is capable of. The direction of travel around the circles is determined by formation.perp and target.perp. For smaller obstacles, the intention is that the formation can largely ignore them. This is because it is intended that the pathfinding targets within the formation will deal with finding a way around anything small. Large-scale obstacles would need to be dealt with separately, but could potentially be handled by taking into account the size of the entire formation, and then perform pathfinding for the formation as a whole.
