GDC 2025 Session Viewer
Game AI Summit: Navigating Expansive Worlds: Implementing Custom Large World Support in Unreal
Richard Kogelnig (Principal Software Engineer, Havok)
Location: Room 3004, West Hall
Date: Tuesday, March 18
Time: 3:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Pass Type: All Access Pass, Summits Pass - Get your pass now!
Track: Programming
Format: Lecture
Vault Recording: TBD
Audience Level: Intermediate
Massive worlds cause massive problems for NPC navigation. Pathfinding across large complex spaces can cause unwanted in-game stutters or blow memory budgets, while recreating navigation data and manually placing traversal annotations (such as jumps, vaults, and climbs) grinds iterating on content to a halt.
In this session, learn how Havok streamlined the creation of navigation data for massive worlds in Unreal Engine. Richard Kogelnig covers the tools and techniques used to get the most out of developer iteration time and runtime navigation performance. The talk goes into detail on how advanced navigation features, like traversal analysis, cluster graphs, and global region pruning, were integrated on top of Unreal Engine's suite of Editor tools.
Takeaway
Attendees will gain insight into techniques for efficient NPC navigation in expansive game environments and learn the common pitfalls to avoid. They will also discover how to structure a world partition-based solution in Unreal Engine and adapt editor workflows to optimize development processes
Intended Audience
This talk is for performance conscious game AI developers who work on projects involving NPCs navigating large worlds in and outside of Unreal. As well as developers who are interested in approaches to extending Unreal Engine with custom solutions.