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So basically, when the level has been designed by a level designer, you can go through and mark up the nav mesh, and the cost is like a risk assessment: if I go through here, it's going to cost me in life or in time or in discomfort or in oxygen. When you say cost, it's the cost to that AI of not achieving their goals?

TL;DRFrancesco Roccucci confirms navigation cost is distance weighted by extra values such as hazards, which designers can mark up manually for static features, with the aim of extracting this automatically from the environment.

Exactly, exactly. The cost in pathfinding is usually a combination of the actual distance they need to pass through, but then the distance gets weighted based on additional values. In this case, you can see some more of the debug examples, where the AI can pass through corridors with simulated hazards. But we have use cases for this for multiple things. One can be, for example, imagine you want to have a pedestrian that goes on the sidewalk, and they try not to be on the road unless they really have to, and they might cross only at the crossroads. So you can actually mark up this environment. We also want to make it completely automatic, so that we can really do that extraction of features and information from the environment in an automatic way. This is the static one. This always allows designers to manually place this information and mark it up. For example, there is a bonfire on PU, whatever, and it will never turn off, right? It's always there. We can just mark it up and say it is a bit more costly, for example.

Star Citizen Live›Gamedev: AI Sprint Report·
Published on this date.31 Mar 2023
EpisodeNPCs & AI