Hello all. I am working on pathfinding and I am using navigation meshes. I am using A* and have it working. However, as I'm sure most of you know, there's a 'jagged-ness' to the calculated path. I am using the vertices of the various navigation meshes to calculate my path (hence, for me, the jagged-ness). Now the beauty of navigation meshes so that any point on a nav mesh to reachable to any other point on the same nav mesh. So I am trying to put two and two together by using raycasting/line-of-sight/whatever to smooth out my path.
I don't know how.
My current plan is to post process my calculated path to make it smoother. This will be done by taking the starting point and checking if it has a line-of-sight to the goal, if not check if the starting point has a LoS to the point before the goal and so on. When a LoS is found a path from the start to the point is created, and the process starts again with the found point being the new 'starting point'. Sounds good, but I have a problem with the line-of-sight part.
I don't know how.
My current plan (regarding the LoS issue) is to calculate a polygon 'outline' that covers the navigation meshes (IE: I'm taking several (overlapping/connected) polygons and 'adding' them together so any overlapping parts are removed and I have a single silhouette polygon). Once I have that, I can simply check if a ray from point-to-point crosses said polygon's edge, if it does then there's no LoS. Of course, I have a problem calculating the outline polygon.
I don't know how.
So my question is: How do I calculate the polygon outline from set of overlapping/connected polygons?
Or, perhaps even, is this dumb and is there a better way to do this?
