We have just released v2.7 of Mercuna with some very exciting new features: Automatic jump link generation – as part of the navgrid build Mercuna can now identify locations where agents can jump across gaps or down from heights and will create nav rails. This saves designers time, as they no longer need to place..
Last year was an exciting year for Mercuna, with a growing client list, new team members and some fantastic Mercuna-navigated game releases. While we can’t believe it is already 2022, we wanted to share some of our 2021 highlights. Ground Navigation Improvements A big focus of our efforts was maturing our new ground navigation solution..
Mercuna is excited to announce that we have been awarded an Epic MegaGrant to help fund the development of our new off-road navigation middleware for vehicle and animal AI. Epic MegaGrants is a scheme run by Epic Games, who have committed $100 million to support game developers, enterprise professionals, media and entertainment creators, students, educators,..
One of the most fundamental problems facing agents in game worlds is how to move to a specific location. While a variety of solutions exist for characters moving on the ground, for agents navigating freely in three dimensions, such as drones, submarines, or characters with jetpacks, this is a much harder problem. This post looks..
Unreal Engine 4 has been engineered with the assumption that code plugins will include their full source code when distributed. However this can often be undesirable, as for example, in our case where we want to offer an evaluation version of Mercuna for people to try out but don’t want to make our full source..
Mercuna now works with Unity! Over the last month we have been hard at work integrating Mercuna with the Unity game engine. There is a long list of small features to be finished off, but the core of it is done and we have agents flying around Unity levels. When we first started writing Mercuna,..
8 Things Every Startup Should Do At GDC You know, I love GDC. We spend so much of our working time staring into code, that it’s actually nice to meet-up and share that buzz with like-minded people. With over 20,000 attendees, it is easily the biggest conference for games professionals anywhere in the world, and..
We originally wrote Mercuna with PC and consoles in mind, but recently we got asked about whether Mercuna ran on Android. The enquiry was through an evaluation request, and my initial response was going to be no, it wasn’t something we had ever tried. However, I decided it was first worth looking to see how..
We are pleased to announce the release of version 0.9 of Mercuna. This is a significant move forward from version 0.8, with two new major features and wide ranging refactor. We had intended for 0.9 to be a modest step forward, but we soon realised that with a bit more work we could pack in..
A new feature that I have been working on recently and that I am very excited about is our new spline based steering system. We wanted to solve the problem of jerky movement and agents occasionally sliding off paths and hitting walls, and to have more natural looking movement. We want agents to take the..