Finding shapes of meshes within a scene..

[Chiblue]

I have been working on building a A* pathfinding solution for use with SBX scenes, I have a basically functional solution with a couple of problems.

 

Buildings and other meshes in the scene that are open to entering, I have been using AABB entity functions to get the bounding areas of meshes, the problem I have whit this is that is say the building is open to be entered the bounding area does not consider this and as such my path finding routing can only find paths around the mesh not inside it... I was going to use a class node point that can be places within the mesh to show the interior structure and entrances, this works but is clumsy and requires a significant effort in the scene design. What would be better would be to allow my graph engine to map the inside of the building even as a new graph layer (Layers represent distinct scene areas, AI bots are not allowed across layers unless specific pathways are designed into the scene) anyway.. I guess what I am asking is there a way to break a mesh down so that I can find if the interior is accessible and if it is open within. I was thinking of casting a raycast on all meshes to map them.

 

I have a scene preperation routine that prepares the scene to run on my dedicated server, this maps all the meshes and creates the layers and graphs for each layer. this cuts down load time and all bot control is done on the server.

 

Any creative ideas would be appreciated...

 

The other issue I am having is bot control, I currently have all players, human and AI using body controllers, I am not sure if this is a practical solution, should I just create bounding boxes and then move the players, other than the client player this way, but keep the client player using a body controller... or is there practically no difference between these 2 approaches, I don't want to find when I get this functioning the right way that when I hit 50 players both AI and human the clients cannot deal with handling all the body controllers... thoughts please?

 

thanks

[Pixel Perfect]

I was thinking of casting a raycast on all meshes to map them.

I use raycasting to determine geometry within my A* solution and it works pretty well.

 

I currently have all players, human and AI using body controllers, I am not sure if this is a practical solution

I have used and demoed up to 40 simultaneous character controllers in action and Leadwerks seems to handle this without issue.

[Chiblue]

I use raycasting to determine geometry within my A* solution and it works pretty well.

 

Do you use raycasting to create the entire graph or just on meshes within the scene?

 

 

I have used and demoed up to 40 simultaneous character controllers in action and Leadwerks seems to handle this without issue.

 

Thank you that helps me to feel better about my approach...

[Pixel Perfect]

Do you use raycasting to create the entire graph or just on meshes within the scene?

Yeah, I use raycasting to create the entire graph (excluding dynamic objects which are handled in real time); so static meshes and terrain. This is done once and the data stored for loading with the level.