GDC 2025 Session Viewer
The Discovery of the Perfect Nav Mesh
Ben Sunshine-Hill (Tech Lead, Havok)
Pass Type: All Access Pass, Core Pass - Get your pass now!
Track: Programming
Format: Lecture
Vault Recording: TBD
Audience Level: Intermediate
Is there even such a thing as a "perfect" nav mesh? What would be the point of having one? And why is your AI so bad at navigating on cave walls and rope bridges? In this session, Ben Sunshine-Hill pulls back the curtain on more than a decade of evolution in AAA navigation systems, describes the hidden link between navigation and physics, and shows how off-the-shelf geometry processing libraries can be used to generate navigation data you can actually rely on.
Takeaway
Attendees will be inculcated into the deep truths of navigation datasets and will thereby gain uncanny powers over them. Forever changed by these revelations, they will understand the imperfections of their nav mesh generators, how to work around them, and how to overcome them.
Intended Audience
Gameplay systems programmers, particularly in AI and animation, will benefit from this talk. A basic knowledge of computational geometry (such as convex hulls and union operations on shapes) will be helpful but not necessary. This talk contains no math equations.