Hello!

I'm back from my short summer trip to Stockholm and Kuressaare. The remainder of my time off will be spent at home (Umea) which means lots of coding. :-)

The last few days I have been contemplating various techniques regarding navigation meshes/waypoints which are handy both for the player character and NPCs. The ideas I have got so far are:

Generate the waypoints from the level geometry. This can quickly become a rather large task.

Generate the waypoints using a bot which walks around and drops waypoints as it strolls. This will work some what like a blind man with a walking stick trying to figure out his surroundings. The generated mesh might not encompass the entire level. The mesh will also get better and better the longer the bot walks around.

Create the mesh in the level editor, i.e. manually place waypoints at specific locations.

Right now I am leaning towards the last idea because it is the most simple to implement and I don't think the workload will be that large. When I have done this and got a nice number of waypoints on various locations I will do a ray test between them to see which waypoints connect with each other. This is to generate travelable routes. When this is accomplished I have to figure out the fastest route between different waypoints. I guess something similar to an A* routine should work; I have to investigate this further. Any ideas or comments on this are welcome.

Right now I have got point and click controls as well as keyboard controls working fairly well. The point and click scheme just needs a path finding algorithm to be implemented.


Random screenshot :)Thanks for reading!

[edit]
Oh btw. Just bought my first Mac yesterday, it should arrive sometime next week 8D
[/edit]