About Navigation Mesh Pathfinding

[Guest]

I've heard that they're adding NavMesh Navigation to DayZs' Zombies Pathfinding - in order to make zombies for efficient, smarter, and less performance consuming.

 

http://dayzdev.tumblr.com/post/85919354781/the-challenge-and-saga-of-zombie-pathfinding

 

But,

This seems like its a static solution  - unable to continously update. If this is true, will this cause many problems when implementing base building? Destruction? Procedurally Generated Collision?

 

-I want to bring this to dicussion because I feel it's important that we can know if future possibilities may be limited in this game.

Edited May 22, 2014 by Guest

[Karmaterror 982]

They have a dynamic system that raycasts all the time to generate the navmesh. Its a little over my head to be honest, They call it a "procedural navmesh". Its not like a static one, as hand creating a static one would be too time consuming :)

Edited May 22, 2014 by Karmaterror

[Death By Crowbar 1213]

It is the residual image of your digital self. Follow the rabbit...

[mithrawndo 166]

They are using a system called Recast/Detour to generate the data necessary for zombie navigation. From their webpage:

Detour offers simple static navigation mesh which is suitable for many simple cases, as well as tiled navigation mesh which allows you to plug in and out pieces of the mesh. The tiled mesh allows you to create systems where you stream new navigation data in and out as the player progresses the level, or you may regenerate tiles as the world changes.

 

To massively oversimplify how this works, you throw your map data into recast and it generates a copy of your map in voxels. You then select how you would like to split this voxel copy of your map up, and then create a navigation mesh using the nice and simple data (compared to doing this manually!) that's been provided in the form of a voxel mould.

The final part of this is the reason why you break the voxel map into regions is so that the final part of this process - Detour - can be fed the data for these regions bit by bit, on the fly, as the world changes rather than slamming the server in the face with a full navmesh regeneration each time someone adds a barricade.

This system is also open source, so they're able to make any changes necessary to the code to better suit what they're trying to achieve. 

[Etherious 907]

I've heard that they're adding NavMesh Navigation to DayZs' Zombies Pathfinding - in order to make zombies for efficient, smarter, and less performance consuming.

 

http://dayzdev.tumblr.com/post/85919354781/the-challenge-and-saga-of-zombie-pathfinding

 

But,

This seems like its a static solution  - unable to continously update. If this is true, will this cause many problems when implementing base building? Destruction? Procedurally Generated Collision?

 

-I want to bring this to dicussion because I feel it's important that we can know if future possibilities may be limited in this game.

Destruction of what? ._.

[Guest]

Destruction of what? ._.

I was meaning that, for example, a building collapses/get destroyed, would the zombies still be using thier old navmesh path.

Edited May 22, 2014 by Guest

[Etherious 907]

I was meaning that, for example, a building collapses/get destroyed, would the zombies still be using thier old navmesh path.

I would think that they would be able to maneuver out of the way or maybe on top of it.