Navigation is an essential element of space and flight sims, and it is also important that AI steer and move correctly. Mercuna 3D Navigation takes your gameplay beyond combat in simple, open spaces, and gives you the freedom to explore all the endless possibilities of complex environments. With Mercuna, your AI can fly around space stations and through buildings, or enable AI to dogfight close to moving asteroids and chase players through twisty mines or tunnels.
Gameplay around complicated structures and combat in confined spaces requires a volumetric navigation solution. The Mercuna 3D Navigation middleware enables AI action close to terrain and through gaps in structures. Our sparse navigation octree maps the fine-detailed topography of your levels, ensuring flight can take place close to geometry without any collisions. When travelling long distances, you can take full advantage of our asynchronous hierarchical pathfinding and spatial searches to perform long-range queries without impacting your game’s performance.
Good flight is also about more than just 3D pathfinding. Mercuna generates smoothed paths so that flight looks more realistic, avoiding any jerks or pauses as the AI flies around corners and makes turns in space. Our steering and movement modules can be configured to replicate Newtonian physics so that players get to experience real flight, but it can also be used to create a more arcade-style movement. Our dynamic avoidance system means that AI can fly around in the middle of an asteroid belt or city without crashing into each other, or into adjacent objects.