Agenda

We will comprehensively describe best-practice technologies and techniques for navigation and related character behavior tasks. After touching briefly on the basic algorithms and data structures, such as A* and nav meshes, we will move to character- and use case-specific concerns: vehicles, climbing, flying, parkour-ing, and large swarms and groups. We will describe the interactions between pathfinding, path following, character animation, and character physics, and how to ensure that each system supports the others. We will also cover methods for dealing with large and dynamically changing worlds, and on non-navigation queries which support NPC AI. The focus will be on well-tested industry-standard methods which are performant and robust.

Takeaway

Attendees will gain broad knowledge of how the most effective and accomplished game development teams today tackle character navigation, and of how to achieve the best results while maintaining performance and reliability when moving beyond basic use cases into more exotic character capabilities and behaviors.