Collision Detection with Navigation Meshes

This chapter presents a technique to extend the navigation meshes generated using the adaptive space-filling volume (ASFV) algorithms to support and improve the speed of collision queries for objects present in the game world. This is done by providing four algorithms to extend navigation meshes to allow for object management (insert, update, remove, and find collidable objects). By utilizing a navigation mesh in this manner, a game or simulation developer is able to reduce the run time expenses in memory and CPU cycles of creating and maintaining one data structure for collision detection and another structure for agent navigation. The chapter shows experimentally that the navigation mesh actually performs better than the commonly used k-d tree data structures in all types of collision across multiple game environments. Overall, the navigation mesh is an excellent general spatial data structure and it is ready for uses going beyond that of agent navigation.