Navigation Set Hierarchy.ppt

Navigation Set Hierarchy Tom Gianos Chapter 2.2 Mike Dickheiser Works (worked?) for Red Storm Entertainment Part of Ubisoft Developer of Tom Clancy Games like Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six His work focuses on efficient AI systems for games and AI control of highly realistic vehicles Problem With Dynamic Pathfinding Dynamic pathfinding acts as CPU hog Blocks the development of more exciting AI features by wasting CPU cycles Solution: Precompute navigation information Issues with Precomputation Levels/maps of games today are massive Could contain thousands of nodes Precomputed navigation information could take up massive amounts of memory Solution: Navigation Set Hierarchy What is Navigation Set Hierarchy? A multitier extension of the basic preprocessed navigation solution with comparable speed and considerably less memory overhead What is the basic precomputed solution? Basic component is a lookup table (called a transition or solution table) where each entry represents the next step between a source node and a goal node In other words, for every pair of nodes Source and Goal, the entry [S][G] represents the node that should be visited next A Simple Example Simple Code Void buildBestPath(int source, int goal, listint path) { path.push_back(source); while(source != goal) { source = _transitionTable[source][goal]; path.push_back(source); } } Navigation Sets Transform the single monolithic navigation map into a hierarchy of several smaller sub-maps called navigation sets Navigation Set: A self contained collection of nodes that requires no links to external nodes in order to complete a path from one internal node to another A complete precomputed transition table can be constructed for each navigation set Interface Nodes and the Interface Navigation Set Once the monolithic map is broken up into navigation sets a problem that arises is cross set navigation To solve this, identify all nodes in the navigation sets that connect to nodes in other navigation sets