Difference between revisions of "NAVCUT"

Your pet robot has very poor vision; everything is a confusing blur to it, and it keeps bumping into walls whenever it tries to walk around your house. However, it can see color just fine. You decide to solve the problem by painting the floors of your house red, and teaching the robot to only walk where it sees red. In a video game, we call that red paint a "navigation mesh" or "navmesh," and it covers anywhere that a character can safely walk.

Now imagine that there are some rooms that you don't ''always'' want your pet robot to enter. It needs to be able to find its way into those rooms ''sometimes,'' but there are occasions where you want it to stay out. You might solve the problem by laying a blue blanket over the entrances to the rooms, so that the robot can't see a red path. In Skyrim, we call these blue blankets "NAVCUT primitives," because they are simple shapes ("primitives," like cubes and spheres) that "cut" a navmesh into pieces to block paths. We can "[[enable]]" a NAVCUT primitive to block access to a location, and then "[[disable]]" it to allow access again, and this is useful for things like retractable bridges and destructible walkways.