pathfinding

[Rick]

Is there a way, using the current LE pathfinding system, to create weighted values for certain areas? This is a fairly common thing in 2D A* pathfinding where there are many ways to get to where you want to go but some are faster, even if they are longer, because of penalties of the area you are walking. An example would be roads vs tall grass. Tall grass would incur a walking penatly making it slower even though it might be a straight line, than using a road that zig zags but is easier to walk on.

 

I would like to think recast could have "soft" obstacles that don't stop a path from being made with it, but make the path more expensive to walk than another path.

 

Along those lines, having multiple versions of the grid would be nice because some characters you may want to use 1 mesh, and others you want to use another.

[gamecreator]

This is critical for games like Civilization where units take longer to walk over mountains but travel faster over roads and even faster by rail. But I think it would require that the navigation mesh areas/shapes be customizable (as opposed to it generating them automatically for you just based on mesh layout) which I'd guess may be a pain to implement (but hopefully not).

[Rick]

I think handling the speeds of travel would be easy to do with trigger areas, but I'm talking more about influencing what paths get picked by weight (not sure if that happens in Civ).

[gamecreator]

Yeah, that's what I meant. Civ units often go out of their way to find faster paths even though the direct route is shorter.