Agenda
Flying Navigation With Supersonic Performance
Ben Sunshine-Hill (Tech Lead, Havok Navigation, Havok)
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Track:
Programming
Audience Level:
Advanced
Format:
Lecture
Vault Recording: TBD
Audience Level: Advanced
Pathfinding for characters running around a game world is a well-known and well-covered problem, but what about flying characters? Three dimensional navigation is far more difficult, with data for large, detailed worlds consuming hundreds of gigabytes and requiring millions of iterations to find a single path. In this talk, Ben Sunshine-Hill will describe Havok's recent research work on 3D navigation. First, a way to compress 3D navigation data to a tiny fraction of its raw size, loosely inspired by sparse voxel octrees, while still allowing for realtime queries and traversals. Second, an improved heuristic for A* pathfinding, used in high-performance GIS but largely unknown in game development, which stops A* from wasting time exploring dead ends.
Takeaway
Attendees will come away with the expertise to implement high-performance pathfinding for flying and swimming characters, and even to accelerate their existing 2D pathfinding. People will stop them on the street and ask "how are your iteration counts so low?"
Intended Audience
This talk will be useful for any programmer working with character navigation, flying or not, including those using off-the-shelf pathfinding libraries. A basic knowledge of A* pathfinding will be helpful.