Hi all,
I am noticing that the RVO agents tend to avoid the obstacles built through the navmesh going too far from them.
Since the graph generator consider the character’s radius already, should the obstacle avoidance consider the character as having radius 0 when avoiding obstacles built out of the navmesh?
This might imply to maintain a separate obstacles list for these obstacles.
That is true and it is a issue I have tried to solve, but not yet in a very good way.
While I have been able to make RVO obstacles thin (i.e the center of the agent should not pass through the wall instead of the whole agent should not pass through or intersect the wall), that caused problems since if the agent happened to cross the wall obstacle by only a tiny tiny bit, the system does not know if it really should be on that side of the obstacle or not, so obstacles become very unstable and does not block very well.
My second approach, which is in the development release right now (see downloads page) is to create a new modifier called RadiusModifier. It assumes a navmesh which has not been shrunk by the characters radius, and it will post process paths to make the path pass some distance from the walls. It is not perfect since all intersections with the walls cannot be found without a lot more extensive computation, but it works for most cases.
You can try it out if it works for you.
Below is a screenshot of the RadiusModifier in action.
See also, radius modifier documentation http://arongranberg.com/astar/docs_dev/class_radius_modifier.php