Tripwire’s Maneater is a Single-Player Action RPG, set in the Gulf Coast’s unforgiving waters. Taking place both on top of the waves and deep beneath the surface, the player takes on the role of a fearsome shark, with the goal to feed on unsuspecting ocean inhabitants to become the ultimate predator. You have to hunt down and eat Mercuna-driven AI fish, swimmers, and other sea creatures to evolve to become a bigger shark and progress through the game.

In Maneater, the player-controlled shark is able to freely explore a rich and varied ocean environment. To bring this world to life, Tripwire Interactive turned to Mercuna 3D Navigation to power the movement of all underwater AIs. Using a full 3D navigation system is essential for an open world game like this, where the AI need to be able to navigate throughout the expansive environment as freely as the player, always knowing where to flee when they sense the predator of the sea.

As you roam from swamps to the coast and back to the deep ocean, you encounter a diverse variety of creatures spanning from small, harmless fish to giant, hostile crocodiles and competing sharks. Using a separate navigation graph for each AI type would have required too much memory and placed artificial restrictions on game design, so Mercuna’s ability to support multiple agent sizes on a single navigation octree proved essential to managing memory usage. And it’s not just the challenge of the large range of AI sizes which needed to be solved: Mercuna was also able to provide an immediate solution for handling the range of sea depths in the game. Mercuna’s modifier volumes allowed designers to easily restrict where creatures could move, ensuring, for instance, that the deep sea creatures remained where they belong in the ocean depths.