Pathfinding with Detour

A few days ago I posted that we've added automatic navigation meshes using Recast, and now I'd like to show some navigation paths using its companion library, Detour. These libraries come with some really nice-looking debug visualization utilities, so I thought I would show them off here. Here are a few quick pathfinding tests to see how Detour handles some common trouble spots:

Those look pretty accurate to me! It may look like the corners are cut so closely that the character would bump into a wall, but this is not the case; the navigation meshes are already taking the character's collision radius into account. Now let's see how it handles longer paths:

It seems to work well on paths of any length, but sometimes shows a slight preference for going through tile corners. The navigation mesh is divided into tiles so that Recast only has to voxellize a small part of the scene at a time, and the tile connections may be biasing the navigation heuristics a little -- this should be pretty quick to sort out.

The next step is to get some AI characters to run along these paths, and see how it goes. There is a lot of interesting work to do to combine pathfinding with actual combat strategy and teamwork, and these libraries will help us get to that a lot sooner.