For once I have something visual relating to my honours project, so it seemed appropriate to share a sample here.

A major part of the project involves distributing microcells (fixed areas of the world) between a series of worker nodes both statically and dynamically. In order to test methods of achieving this, I created a small testbed application which simulates the task without networking. It is capable of using various methods to distribute cells, both at the start of the application and as it runs, both controlled by a central server and initiated by worker nodes and gives graphical and numerical feedback.

The images below were taken with a greatly reduced number of cells, and the work involved in processing each cell is artificial: there are no pathfinding characters yet. However hopefully it demonstrates to some extent how division of the world takes place, and allows me to easily test distribution methods before using them in the proper simulation.

Coloured by number of characters per cell.

Initial block distribution.

Random distribution for comparison.

Block distribution with dynamic passing after time.

As the actual application I am working on is written in C#, I used XNA to create the images here. As it is possible to render XNA frames to a windows form application with little difficulty, this is also the approach I will employ for visualising the complete project.