Moving entities is one of the most fundamental processes in implementing a game. BigWorld provides two main mechanisms to accomplish this task: navigation and seeking.
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Navigation
This is the primary way to move NPCs (non-player characters) around the world. It uses a map of navigation information generated in an offline process, and can take into account the size of the entity.
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Seek
This is a client-side function used to line up the player for interactions with other entities.
Navigation can take into account the size of the navigating object, and thus follow paths that do not pass too close to obstacles. The pre-generated navigation information is known as the navigation mesh (navmesh), as it is a collection of polygons generated in an offline tool called NavGen (for details, see the Content Tools Reference Guide's chapter NavGen).
Note
The NavGen's executable navgen.exe can be found under the bigworld/tools/misc folder.
This document describes the steps necessary to make an entity navigate from one point to another in a sensible manner, taking into account their environment.