Wednesday, 14 March 2012

Navmesh Alternative or is it?

I tried and tried to impliment the code from the previous post in so many ways, I gave up. I looked far and high for a solution, and finally after four painful hours of self-inflicted mental torture there was a god... I mean,  videos:

Still now I'm not sure why the code from before did not work, but I found that I can at least cheat the patrolling of my monster by using path nodes. Very generously Ben Townley shared me a kismet sequence he discovered last year that could attach a volume to a spawned bot and kill the player. Since I haven't enough time to get a full melee system working, this is a very important alternative for me. Thank you again Ben, you've saved me.
I had also used a 'MoveActorTo' sequence, and it should have worked perfectly but it didn't. At first I thought it was the nature of my AIController code, so I tried replacing everything with premade code (copy/paste). But nothing worked, besides the code I already had, and I had lost it. My housemate tried to calm me down and tried to help me look for anything to do with Pylons (because i had started muttering it and remembered Ed had mentioned it vaguely for navigational meshes). I felt like I looked it up almost everywhere, there wasn't any tutorials out there that would guide me except for the videos above (which were found not by me but my amazing housemate).

I watched it with the biggest feeling of doubt ever, since nothing was working I didn't think this would either. The current UDK version uses pylons with a area distinguished by a cube rather than a shere/cylinder/circle as shown in the video. I tried what the man in the tutorial had done but it gave me an error:
'error:Could not find ground position for pylon - this pylon will not build paths' 
These lines appeared after building paths with the pylon.
... I then tried it on one of the simple premade levels, it worked, the paths built just fine. The floor there was a static mesh, and I took a very big note of that. Next then I had tried it in an empty level with and Add brush and subtractive brush inside, it didn't work...

So I was questioning if it was because it didn't work on brushes period... this made my heart sink very low. But that was stupid, either it was because the brushes had some form of navigational mesh there already and this pylon business was unessessary or I was doing something wrong- or both.

In the tutorial I finally noticed he was using and additive brush, and everything else was actually a static mesh. My level consists heavily of subtractive brushes. Turns out the pylons do not bod well with subtractive brushes... *BEEP*ing hell.
So i tested this again.


It works!! The monster travels to the second pathnode. This may mean I have to do some heavy reconstruction to my level. Sorry if this seemed obvious to you, but I am an incredible script/code noob. :)

!!!*EDIT*!!!!!
Turns out I was wrong again. Check the next post.

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