I’m really excited you guys are looking at AI stuff for Panda3D, but I was a bit disappointed by the navigation mesh functionality. It seems as if it’s more of a navigation grid than a mesh, and it looks like it needs to be created manually.
So, I took a look at that Recast project, and ended up getting a small portion of it working with Panda3D. Basically I modified the source of their demo application to export .obj files, which I then imported into Blender, and exported to .egg files. Then I used Panda’s vertex reading utilities to go through the vertices and generate pathfinding data.
I got pathfinding to work pretty well with my own methods brainstormed in Python, but I cut some corners for performance, and it’s certainly not a textbook navmesh implementation. However, it makes me think that someone experienced with the C++ workings of Panda3D could crank out some good code fairly quickly, especially since a lot (if not all?) of it is already done in PandAI.
I think the ability to use automatically-generated navmeshes from Recast is a great feature, and it’s already saved me a lot of time. So, does the current version of PandAI support navigation meshes with different shapes (actually, just triangles)? If not I might look into working on it in C++, but it will take me some time to get up to speed.