Recast map dumper with doodads?

**badusername1234** · 12-25-2017

Hi, I've been using the Mangos movemap generator for my pathing solutions so far. It works really well but it will completely ignore doodads.

For example, the pathfinder will try to run through these fire objects in Orgimmar and get blocked. A solution I came up with was to just noclip through doodads which works fine but looks too obvious to other players and I'd rather not do that.

Are there any versions of the map generator which do take into account doodads? I have found a few different versions so far but none of them have seemed to include that. I know I could implement this myself if I had the time but I'd be surprised if someone in the emu scene hasn't done this already.

thanks

**Jadd** · 12-25-2017

You can add temporary obstacles using recast. You should do it when a doodad with collision is loaded in.

recastnavigation/Sample_TempObstacles.cpp at master * recastnavigation/recastnavigation * GitHub

**namreeb** · 12-26-2017

My experience with Recast’s support for temporary obstacles is too much complication for too little results. It introduces ambiguous and confusing terms and the method it uses is not well described. I had better luck rolling my own support, wherein I serialize the finalized mesh data for a tile but also the uncompacted height field. This way temporary obstacles can be rasterized into the heightfield and the final compaction and tesselation can be done in relatively short order. I’m fairly sure that this is essentIally the same approach as recast, but it seems simpler to me and “just works”.

Note also that depending on your use case, you don’t necessarily want to avoid doodads.

**badusername1234** · 12-26-2017

Thanks for the suggestions guys, I wouldn't have thought of just using the doodads as temporary obstacles. It sounds like an easier way to approach things and I'm most likely going to need to implement dynamic obstacles at some point anyway ( i.e to avoid a pack of high level mobs with whom bot has no interest in fighting, avoid hunter traps or avoid aoe ).

Before I get to the point of implementing temporary obstacles into the navmesh, I need to be able to get the temporary obstacles. I believe I already know how to hook doodads spawning but I'll need to figure out how to get the mesh data. Do you think I'd have an easier time trying to grab that mesh data from memory, or just to find out what model name the doodad uses and load that from a file?

Also, why wouldn't I want to avoid doodads? The use case for this is a general-purpose bot so I'm not sure I can get away without this. Every time I've tested my bot doing something it has worked nicely until randomly managing to find a doodad to get stuck on. For example, it would die in RFC and corpse run back to the instance portal but run into those metal brazier things on the way down into the cleft of shadows... I suppose I could avoid all of the hassle by just teleporting through doodads and hoping it just looks like lag haha

**namreeb** · 12-26-2017

Originally Posted by badusername1234

Thanks for the suggestions guys, I wouldn't have thought of just using the doodads as temporary obstacles.

Just to be clear, I don't think that is what you should do. The server cannot spawn doodads, so they are not actually temporary, and therefore you might as well process them ahead of time. It shouldn't be too hard to fix the parsing code you're using to include them.

Originally Posted by badusername1234

Also, why wouldn't I want to avoid doodads? The use case for this is a general-purpose bot so I'm not sure I can get away without this.

When I wrote that, I was thinking of gameobjects rather than doodads. If you are writing pathfinding for NPCs, there is some evidence that avoidance of temporary obstacles (read: game objects) is not blizzlike.

**MaiN** · 01-02-2018

Originally Posted by namreeb

My experience with Recast’s support for temporary obstacles is too much complication for too little results. It introduces ambiguous and confusing terms and the method it uses is not well described. I had better luck rolling my own support, wherein I serialize the finalized mesh data for a tile but also the uncompacted height field. This way temporary obstacles can be rasterized into the heightfield and the final compaction and tesselation can be done in relatively short order. I’m fairly sure that this is essentIally the same approach as recast, but it seems simpler to me and “just works”.

Note also that depending on your use case, you don’t necessarily want to avoid doodads.

Shout-Out

User Tag List

Thread: Recast map dumper with doodads?

Thread Tools

Search Thread