Hello, I use the navmesh system for my enemy AIs and was hoping to use it to calculate sound propagation for my game’s stealth mechanics (lower the sound detection level and the actual volume of sounds if they pass through doors to reach the enemy). To do this the sound needs to be very fast. Putting really high speed and acceleration values into the navmesh agent of the sound propagation object causes the objects to never reach the enemy and just zoom across the level. Is there a way to calculate this without dealing with a physical representation of the object and have it actually zip about? I don’t want to deal with the physics of acceleration and rotation speed and all that, just a simple constant speed or even just a timer, account for doors along the path of the sound. Can it be done?
Sorry if this is the wrong thread but I figured it was generally about sound.
Was just researching a similar thing: how to do Doom-style sound propagation (= wake up monsters) without having a BSP/PVS tree to traverse and also doing this in full 3D, as in Quake.
Generally: yes. Pathfinding seems like a good candidate I’ll be exploring for sound propagation in enclosed 3D spaces for alerting enemies.
Of course you’d have to alter the Navmesh settings since sound is not an entity that gets blocked because a step is too high, a space too narrow, or a slope too steep. Here’s what I’ll try first:
- Agent Radius => close to zero
- Agent Height => close to zero
- Max Slope => close to 180° or max
- Step Height => reasonably high value, ie 10 meters, so sound isn’t blocked by cliffs but you wouldn’t want to disturb the princess sleeping at the top of the tower
The navmesh may need to be extended to include walls and possibly even ceilings.
You can then check the length of a path between A and B and decide whether enemy heard the sound or not - this isn’t totally accurate but any oddities can certainly be accomodated by the level design.
You’ll also need to setup a separate navmesh for actual navigation unless you like enemies walking on walls/ceilings.