Chapter 5113A path represented by a series of polygons illustrates not only the direction your pawn
can travel, but also the space the pawn can occupy. Rather than needing to touch each
point precisely along a waypoint-graph generated path as we would have had to do with
the WayPoints, all of the information associated with the interface between nodes of the
navigation mesh is provided to the AI. This benefits us twofold: it provides a more accurate
and natural looking movement, in addition to eliminating corner cutting.
Benefits of NavMeshes
The overall graph density goes down as we can now use polygons instead of numerous
nodes in a given area to represent a movable area. These are just a few of the benefits
of this approach:
f Memory footprint reduction coincides with the decrease in nodes being stored
f As the density of the graph being indexed decreases, pathfinding time goes down
f Fewer nodes means less time wasted correcting cross-level pathing informationAdditional benefits are listed in the next section.
Improved representation of the environment
A constant representation of the walkable area is advantageous for many other types of space
searches an AI might do.