Development Blog

Did you already figure out how the infinite terrain will work with navmesh generation and navigation?  I'm guessing for generation you'll have to load all the terrain at once.  I assume it's not a problem to have character controllers navigate on a navmesh when a terrain isn't loaded (they're independent of each other?).

That is a difficult question to answer. I don't know if I will have a solution to that when 1.0 comes out.

That's fair.  Keep taking those steps forward and try to make the official release as complete as possible (in a reasonable time frame).  I don't envy the pressure you might feel sometimes.

Pressure? What pressure?

I want to support the project, but the only possible means of payment I have, is by steam. Is it possible to put a product, for example a Turbo card to be sold by steam?

Seriously, how the heck would you plot a path from San Diego to Orlando? It can't be done without loading data for the entire route in between. Perhaps the navmesh should have a distance limit for pathfinding.

@Iris3D Games Thank you but the beta will not be on Steam.

The good news is that it's been done elsewhere so there is at least one working solution.  I suspect the path is broken up into multiple points and all an engine calculates is the path between the current point and the next point.  When you get to the next point, you calculate the path to the next one after that, etc.  But there's gotta be information out there on this.

I think the only possible solution is to have local nav meshes with a limited area connected by a hand-placed “highway” type of system.

When I was playing with this idea I was doing a treadmill system. A 3x3 grid where the player always stays in the middle tile. When they move "left" for example and get close to the edge of that middle tile it would load in the 3 new tiles to the left of the most left 3 tiles and then when they actually crossed the line it would swap the entire grid position wise and then move the player back. Since everything moved relative in 1 go the player would never tell the difference. It would then unload the right most 3 tiles that aren't needed anymore. In my case it wasn't real terrain but modeled terrain and it was all flat. Given LE didn't have multithreaded loading of assets all assets had to be loaded up front so instances could just be created which was more instant.