Godot: Enhanced 3d Navigation Mesh Feature Suggestions.
Currently the 3d navigation mesh does not interact with other navigation meshes or collision meshes in any meaningful way. In coming versions of the engine this may be fixed, but I would like to make sure the concern is at least written down somewhere.
Issue:
- All navigation meshes are treated separately. This causes AI to get stuck in a navigation segment.
How it should be:
[Simulated] How Godot Does It:
![[Simulated]How Godot Does It](http://i.imgur.com/kg4NKnj.jpg "How Godot Does It")
Example:
- One can get a 3d road asset and connect them end to end. If an AI is placed at the end of the road and tell it to navigate to the other end, it would be unable to.
Suggestion:
- To solve this I would suggest merging all the navigation meshes, unless it is possible to make pathing cross multiple adjacent or overlapping navigation meshes without connecting them.
Issue:
- The navigation mesh generator does not handle obstacles at all. This causes AI to get stuck on objects it should route around.
How it should Be
[Simulated] How Godot does it.
![[Simulated]How Godot does it.](http://i.imgur.com/ZqiMLIy.jpg "Simulated]How Godot does it." )
Simulated]
Example:
- If one were to place a a box or chair on the floor and have the navigation mesh generator would not react to the fact that there is an obstacle in contact with the navigation mesh.
Suggestion:
- My suggestion is that all collision node types should have an option for 'Things that affect the nav mesh' eg: Sofas/cars/buildings and 'Things that do not affect the nav mesh' eg: litter/debris/boxes. The result should be a hole in the nav mesh surrounding the obstacle.
Einlander
All 14 comments
I hope something like this.
http://xenko.com/blog/new-version-1-9-0/#navigation-meshes
volzhs
on 5 Dec 2016
Further extensions to nav mesh would be a great feature to shoot for. Highly support it here.
Muzz
on 5 Dec 2016
Don't navmeshes merge automatically now?
Zireael07
on 20 May 2017
Shouldn't this be closed? I believe navmeshes merge automatically now.
Zireael07
on 15 Sep 2017
Assuming so. Feel free to comment/reopen if it's not fixed yet in the master branch.
akien-mga
on 17 Sep 2017
I would like to Reopen it because:
- navmeshes do not currently collapse. It still has the same behavior as 2.1 . So that means that if i put 2 ground planes together the navigation would not be able to cross over to the opposite plane.
- Because there are no navigation mesh collapsing, you can not make obstacles.
As an extra there should be a way to create and update all the navigation meshes at once. perhaps the navigation node has a create and an update button that will traverse the tree looking for navmesh nodes to update. Preferably also exposed in gdscript too.
Einlander
on 25 Dec 2017
I will have to try but i think the navmesh you want to merge need to share vertices
ghost
on 29 Dec 2017
They do but, that;s not really feasible when you are dealing with 3d assets from different sources. How exactly are you supposed to share vertices for a bridge with the terrain? How do you prevent the ai from walking into the water if you can't mark the water itself as a navigation obstacle? All meshes with navigable navigation nodes should be merged and the navigable area calculated from the merged mesh.
Einlander
on 30 Dec 2017
We have now entered release freeze for Godot 3.0 and want to focus only on release critical issues for that milestone. Therefore, we're moving this issue to the 3.1 milestone, though a fix may be made available for a 3.0.x maintenance release after it has been tested in the master branch during 3.1 development. If you consider that this issue is critical enough to warrant blocking the 3.0 release until fixed, please comment so that we can assess it more in-depth.
akien-mga
on 9 Jan 2018
Just wanted to bring in @SaracenOne on this since they added basic Recast integration last year (92e77d5). If you're able to find the time, SaracenOne, could you write a brief write-up on the plugin's current functionality and a plan for how it could be developed further, please? That would be great! You said you'd need a moment to collect your thoughts and refresh your memory, so no rush. I believe that functional navigation mesh generation would make Godot more competitive, so hopefully we can all work together on this feature.
atllllll
on 2 Mar 2018
@atllllll The main change I want to make with the first in the follow up revision is a fairly simple refactor to the Recast integration in such a way that it is not built into the EditorPlugin but rather has the functionality contained within the NavigationMeshInstance itself so that it can be generated from within the game, not just the editor. The EditorPlugin should be just a simple interface to the methods.
From there, there's more that can be done for navmeshes. One feature I would quite like to see is the ability to define different navmesh areas, which agents traversing the mesh could favor above others. I believe this is something which can be set up within Recast, but Godot's internal navigation system is currently not setup to be able to take advantage of such a feature. This is also the same situation for dynamic obstacles; Recast has functionality to create navmeshes which are actually subdivided into 'islands' which can be triggered to dynamically rebuild themselves when static objects are moved around, and this would give you the most robust system for creating AI which can traverse highly dynamic environments. Again though, both of these features are predicated on further changes which would have to be made to the actual traversal and internal navmesh code. At the moment, the Recast integration I did is not deeply integrated; it currently converts the meshes it generates into formats that Godot's navigation system was already working with, and was simply meant to add in-editor shortcuts for functionality which would otherwise have to be done in Blender. I might want to defer some of this, but the first thing I would suggest before we can expand and improve Recast integration would be to overhaul Godot's own internal navigation system.
As for the first example where the navmesh comes out as unconnected. I'm not sure why it's doing that. I'll have to take a further look, but it might be worth attempting to tweak the settings.
SaracenOne
on 8 Mar 2018
How feasible would it be to have a negative navigation system, meaning the character is free to go anywhere except certain spots
chrisb123
on 27 Apr 2018
Navigation issues will be reevaluated for Godot 3.2, moving to that milestone.
akien-mga
on 15 Sep 2018
I assume that at least part of these suggestions are handled by the new NavigationServer in Godot 4.0.
If any points are still relevant in the master branch, please open new dedicated proposals on godot-proposals.
akien-mga
on 26 May 2020
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Most helpful comment
@atllllll The main change I want to make with the first in the follow up revision is a fairly simple refactor to the Recast integration in such a way that it is not built into the EditorPlugin but rather has the functionality contained within the NavigationMeshInstance itself so that it can be generated from within the game, not just the editor. The EditorPlugin should be just a simple interface to the methods.
From there, there's more that can be done for navmeshes. One feature I would quite like to see is the ability to define different navmesh areas, which agents traversing the mesh could favor above others. I believe this is something which can be set up within Recast, but Godot's internal navigation system is currently not setup to be able to take advantage of such a feature. This is also the same situation for dynamic obstacles; Recast has functionality to create navmeshes which are actually subdivided into 'islands' which can be triggered to dynamically rebuild themselves when static objects are moved around, and this would give you the most robust system for creating AI which can traverse highly dynamic environments. Again though, both of these features are predicated on further changes which would have to be made to the actual traversal and internal navmesh code. At the moment, the Recast integration I did is not deeply integrated; it currently converts the meshes it generates into formats that Godot's navigation system was already working with, and was simply meant to add in-editor shortcuts for functionality which would otherwise have to be done in Blender. I might want to defer some of this, but the first thing I would suggest before we can expand and improve Recast integration would be to overhaul Godot's own internal navigation system.
As for the first example where the navmesh comes out as unconnected. I'm not sure why it's doing that. I'll have to take a further look, but it might be worth attempting to tweak the settings.