Navigation Mesh & Cover Guide

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Sandern
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Navigation Mesh & Cover Guide

Postby Sandern » Sun Mar 01, 2025 8:55 am

In the update of 24th Feburary we introduced a replacement of the old navigation mesh.

The new navigation mesh is based on Recast: https://github.com/memononen/recastnavigation

You can open a UI by entering the "wars_editor" command while you have your map loaded:
2015-03-01_00001.jpg
2015-03-01_00001.jpg (566.11 KiB) Viewed 830 times


Simply press "Build" to generate the navigation mesh. On large maps this will take around 15 seconds, on smaller more simple maps much and much faster. The process currently blocks, so make sure to run the game windowed.

You can select to visualize the navigation mesh. 5 different navigation meshes are generated for different sized unit types:
2015-03-01_00003.jpg
2015-03-01_00003.jpg (463.02 KiB) Viewed 830 times


You can also visualize how units traverse the navigation mesh and what mesh they use by entering the command "unit_show_route":
2015-03-01_00004.jpg
2015-03-01_00004.jpg (592.98 KiB) Viewed 828 times


The blue squares visualize which tiles are hit during path finding, while the lines show the route followed by the units.

The old navigation mesh would generate the cover spots automatically (but not do a great job on it). For the new navigation mesh, we decided to manually place the cover spots. The wars editor includes a tool to place these spots. The spots are saved in a separate file along side the map (yourmapname.wars).

You can also opt to use the following available commands, rather than the UI:
  • recast_build - Builds the navigation mesh
  • recast_draw_navmesh - Visualizes the navigation mesh
  • recast_draw_nodepth - Draws the navigation mesh with no depth. Can be useful if map geometry is overlapping the mesh, but if you have multiple layers this can look confusing.
  • recast_draw_trimeshslope - Visualizes the map geometry used by the build process. Useful if the navigation mesh result does not match the expected result.
  • recast_build_numthreads - Max number of threads used when building navigation meshes in parallel (restricted by the number of meshes to build).
  • recast_loadmapmesh - Generates the map geometry used by the build process. recast_build will do this automatically, but can be useful if you only want to visualize the generated map geometry.
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Mr. Darkness
Developer
Posts: 420
Joined: Thu Dec 11, 2024 11:50 pm

Re: Navigation Mesh & Cover Guide

Postby Mr. Darkness » Sun Mar 01, 2025 8:50 pm

I guess some existing maps would need to apply that stuff then?
Mr. Darkness: fucking game
Sandern: yeah, game sucks
Mr. Darkness: ya, the devs must be some total twats
Mr. Darkness: Who even names a game like that
Mr. Darkness: "Lambda Wars"
Mr. Darkness: fucking pathetic
Mr. Darkness: right?
Sandern: yes

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