Possibility to find a walkable path to approximately desired direction

[AqlaSolutions]

Consider a situation: a bot wants to move away (or step back) from a dangerous place. He knows that he should go somewhere back but no exact point is specified. The task is not about reaching a target but about finding a walkable path to approximately desired direction. We can't just search for random points behind the bot because path to those points actually can lead through the point that the bot wants to avoid. Can you implement something that will help in such scenarios?

I think it's related to #15 but still not duplicate because there could be a better way than just checking many many directions with Raycast method.

[AqlaSolutions]

Example

[Robmaister]

Do you know the dangerous area ahead of time? If so you can define your own Area for those triangles when generating the navmesh and giving it a really high cost during pathfinding.

I haven't heard of anyone using that feature, so it may have a very bad API. I'll look into cleaning it up (or exposing it if some of it is currently private)

[AqlaSolutions]

No, I don't know it ahead of time. It could be a hostile player or AoE.

[Robmaister]

Then what you're looking for is local steering, specifically an avoidance force.

The crowd management code (SharpNav.Crowds) has some related stuff, but the API is still very messy and potentially buggy. It's pretty much a straight port of Recast's crowd management code. I would look there.

This is also pretty much the highest level (in terms of AI) that SharpNav will cover. Anything higher level should be handled by other libraries or yourself. State Machines, Decision Trees, Behavior Trees, etc. are a massive project on their own.

[AqlaSolutions]

@Robmaister of course, I understand the difference. This is not a universal AI library. The local steering implementation should properly deal with obstacles but the current NavMeshQuery API is not well suitable for steering so this task is exactly for navmesh library.

[Robmaister]

👍 NavMeshQuery is for path planning, which to me shouldn't include any steering. It should be layered on top of path planning.

I might also rename the Crowds namespace to Steering or move some of the functionality out to it.

[AqlaSolutions]

@Robmaister it doesn't matter what the name is if it does what we need ))

I will look into it but can you also give any examples on using Crowds to make avoidance force?

[Robmaister]

I don't have any examples as of yet, it should be fairly similar to Recast's at the moment though:

http://masagroup.github.io/recastdetour/group__crowd.html