Guide to the Unofficial Menge Utilities

This provides some documentation on how to use the unofficial menge-slightly-affiliated python utilities. These utilities are a bunch of hacked-together processes and applications to facilitate various aspects the crowd simulation process. They are not supported and most likely have bugs and are definitely, on the whole, haphazardly architected. So, as with all things caveat emptor.

What is in the set of utilties?

There are two large-scale, richly featured tools for authoring and analysis:

• Crowd analysis: A tool for performing post hoc analysis on the results of Menge simulation. It consumes scb files and scene descriptions (particularly the obstacle definitions) and provides tools for performing various types of analysis on the movement of the crowd.
• Scenario Authoring: A tool for authoring various aspects of a Menge scene including defining obstacles, placing agents, defining goal sets, and building roadmaps and navigation fields.

And then a number of simpler utilities for facilitating authoring scenarios and analyzing results: These are, more or less, the independent components

• Adding orientation to SCB data: Replaces orientation information in an scb file with a vector pointing in the direction travelled from time i to time i + 1.
• Creating 2D obstacles from 3D OBJ files: Consumes an obj file and the definition of a plane. Slices the 3D file with the plane, creating obstacles of all of the intersecting edges.
• Creating a navigation mesh from an OBJ file: Consumes an obj file and attempts to create a Menge-style navigation mesh. The code is very fragile and requires a well-conditioned mesh to function properly.
• Querying properties of SCB file: Scans an scb file and computes and prints a number of metrics about the file.
• Plotting the time-dependent orietnation of an agent in an SCB file: Creates a graph of the orientation of an agent based on its scb file with respect to time.
• Sampling an SCB file -- reducing frames, agents, etc.: Creates a new scb file from an input scb file by truncating and sampling the time steps.

Dependencies

Note: There is an active effort to modernize these utilities to Python 3.

• Python 2.7
• Numpy
• Matplotlib
• Pygame
• PyOpenGL
• PyQt4