An Agent Group handles a group of Agents and their behaviours.
- Each Agent has a dependency graph responsible for building the pose of the agent at each frame and a variable set of custom data that we call Metadata. Metadata can be attached to almost every Atoms entity. Agents are just one of them. For a full list of metadatas, please check this section.
- Users can assing Behaviour modules to each Agent Group to customize their simulation. During the simulation Behaviour modules will edit the Agents dependency graph or their metadata, this will make them behave differently. The modules are evaluated in order. By placing a "follow curve" curve module before an "agent avoidance module", Atoms will evaluate the "follow curve" first. For a full list of Behaviour modules and their parameters, please check this section.
To create an "Atoms Agent Group" actor in Unreal, from the modes panel, select the Place mode, then "All Classes" and drag and drop "Atoms Agent Group" into the viewport.
Add a behaviour module
Unreal
Select your Agent group actor from the "World Outliner". Then in the Details Panel, click on "Add Component" and scroll down until you fin the "AtomsBehaviours" section.
The first module in the module stack must be a layout module ("gridLayout","pointsLayout","cacheReader",etc...). These modules create agents inside the agent group during the simulation. After a layout module you would usually add an animation module ("clipReader", "stateMachine", etc...) which add animation to the agents by creating the network of nodes to run animation clips inside the agent dg network. At this point you can add other modules to drive the agents or set metadata.
After adding a module to the stack you can rename it to your liking.
Edit Behaviour module attributes
Unreal
After selecting a module from the component list, you can edit its metadatas as you would for any Unreal component.
Component attributes may be overridable per agent. For instance, if you look at the picture on the right you will see "Agent Type Override", "Direction Override", etc.
Just click on the "Add Override" button to add an override, each override has an integer value on its left representing the agent group Id. It is important that you set it to the right id if you want the override to work as expected.
You can also delete overrides by pressing the down arrow next to each override and clicking "Delete".
