Navigation

So, I've reached the awfully wonderful part of a game's development, where you have weapons programmed and tested, but now, you are just dying to get something to hit in your game.
This means AI is coming up fast!

Okay, so almost any game with an AI system needs to implement some sort of navigation system.

And that's what I've been working on for the past few days.
I have created a Navigation Mesh system for Ruined, that's powered by the A* ( A-Star ) navigation algorithm


You can read up on what exactly a Navigation Mesh is at any of these links:

• http://www.ai-blog.net/archives/000152.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navigation_mesh

Then you can learn about A* and its implantation at any of these:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A*_search_algorithm
• http://theory.stanford.edu/~amitp/GameProgramming/MapRepresentations.html
• http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/artificial-intelligence/a-pathfinding-for-beginners-r2003

Anyways, the gist of this all is that the monsters and enemies in Ruined should be smart enough to find you and KILL you, no matter where you hide :P

The test navigation mesh, with a test path. Red = path

The test mesh was created by hand, on a piece of graph paper.
The test path is from cells A to P.

So, I still need to devise a way to actually make these Navigation Meshes, because doing them all on paper would be RIDICULOUS, but for the most part, I've managed to get one step closer to finishing the game!