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Baking Unity NavMesh with Box Colliders

January 10, 2014 by Devin Reimer

Up until recently in Dyscourse we had been using a pathfinding solution called “A* Pathfinding Project”. While it was a pretty impressive tool we weren’t happy with performance and some of it’s complexity. So I decided to give Unity’s built-in NavMesh a try.

Unity’s NavMesh worked pretty good, but it had one big issue, it didn’t support baking Box Colliders into a navigation mesh. It only supported MeshRenderers and Terrain. In Dyscourse we have a 3D world but everything is flat 2D planes, so this simply wouldn’t work.

Not deterred, I ended up figuring out a work around and created an editor script to do all the heavy lifting. This script automatically bakes Box Colliders into the navigation mesh with the press of a button.

Download NavigationHelper.cs (right-click save as).

To Use:

Simply put this script into an ‘Editor’ folder and add a new Tag into your project called: “TempNavMeshItemDestroyable”.
Run by going to Windows->Navigation Helper and then click ‘Build NavMesh!’. Everything happens automatically.

As an additional option in the script you can edit the COLLIDER_LAYER variable and set it to a layer you want to filter Box Colliders to.

Dyscourse Announcement & Kickstarter

November 6, 2013 by Devin Reimer

This month is a very symbolic month for me, it marks the point at which I’ve now been an indie game developer longer than any other job I’ve ever held. A feat that I did not dare to dream of when I embarked on this crazy adventure.

What makes this month even more awesome is we finally get to announce the next game we at Owlchemy Labs have been cranking away on. The game is called ‘Dyscourse’.

This game is by far the most ambitious project we’ve ever taken on. Because of this, we’re announcing it via Kickstarter to get support to help make it a reality.

So without further ado:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/owlchemylabs/dyscourse-survivors-choose-wisely

In short, Dyscourse is a survival game like you’ve never seen. You and a haphazard group of travelers are marooned on a desert island and your choices greatly affect the outcome.

Dyscourse is a crazy exciting project and the unique Kickstarter video was a blast to create and we think it turned out great.

Update: We are funded!!!! Jump over to the Owlchemy Labs blog for our rundown of some of the announcements we made during the kickstarter: http://owlchemylabs.com/dyscourse-is-happening/