Chapter 8: Navigation Mesh
As we saw in Chapter 7, A* Pathfinding, the most critical decision in pathfinding is how to represent the scene's geometry. The AI agents need to know where the obstacles are, and it is our job as AI designers to provide the best representation we can to the pathfinding algorithm. Previously, we created a custom representation by dividing the map into a 2D grid, and then we implemented a custom pathfinding algorithm by implementing A* using that representation. But wouldn't it be awesome if Unity could do all that for us?
Fortunately, Unity can do this using Navigation Meshes (NavMeshes). While in the previous 2D representation, we divided the world into perfect squares, with NavMeshes, we will divide the world using arbitrary convex polygons. This representation has two exciting advantages: first, every polygon can be different, and therefore we can use a small number of big polygons for vast open areas and many smaller polygons for very crowded...
