Best method for large terrains and indoors combined

Beginner Questions
#1

Hello,

We have a bunch of really huge terrains, plus, potentially huge amounts of caverns and indoors stuff. We got 7 terrains that 2000*2000 units large. There will be NPCs on this map also. I’ve been thinking about a pathfinding system for this. Map is mostly open, but there are a lot of trees and buildings in the way. Tried using default Unity navigation mesh, it is trying to bake it, but it takes so long, progress bar barely moves.

Haven’t tried this asset, can it handle areas that large? What kind of pathfinding system would be best for something like this? Nav meshes? Grid graphs? Some kind of combination of both? (Is that even possible?).

Anyone had any experience over large maps with this? I’d rather hear some thoughts first to decide whether or not to buy this, or roll some custom stuff.

Thanks!

#2

Recast, definitely recast.

The unity pathfinding implementation also uses recast, however the A* Pathfinding Project has the advantage that it allows tiled navmeshes which reduces the memory usage during scanning a lot since each tile is calculated individually instead of everything at once.

I have heard of users using recast on a 7km * 7km terrain (I think it was that large) successfully. They did not need interiors however.

Grid graphs would not work since they would consume too much memory for worlds that large.

#3

Hi!

Thanks for the quick answer! Since the 2 days I posted this thread, I was able to bake a NavMesh in Unity. While it did cover pretty much everything, and it didn’t error out all of a sudden, the mesh that it produced was far away from desirable. Due to the large number of trees and rocks, it created huge amounts of long and thin polygons. I didn’t even bother trying to pathfind with it.

Afaik, Unity also uses recast. I don’t know how comparable the assets recast and the Unity’s recast. How does tiled baking potentially handles such cases?

There won’t be any map wide searches, we are thinking of at most, 500-800 unit wide searches at extreme cases, but, most of the map needs to be traversable.

Edit: Bought it. Seems to work leagues better than Unity navmesh already.

#4
Edit: Bought it. Seems to work leagues better than Unity navmesh already.
:)
Afaik, Unity also uses recast. I don't know how comparable the assets recast and the Unity's recast. How does tiled baking potentially handles such cases?
Do I have to elaborate on this anyway?