Roadmap navigation is a multi-threaded tool used for path finding in very large worlds; mostly used for open-world games.
Road is just a metaphor here, it can be any specific area as long as you can detect that area by blueprints.
The path finding will execute on a custom navigation grid and it has nothing to do with UE4 built-in navigation system.
What can you use it for
- Path finding within custom areas like roads
- Path finding for AI agents
- Find a path between 2 points in a huge world
- Draw path on a map
Navigation only gets generated once and after that, it will be loaded from disk, the generated file will be store in project content so that the players don’t need to generate it after they bought your game. (you can also disable saving/loading feature entirely)
The plugin is designed to fulfil any game’s needs.
You can read the documentation before buying the plugin to see how it exactly works.
A simple minimap is also included with the plugin to show the found path.
The plugin name could be “Custom Navigation” but I liked “Roadmap Navigation” more since it was based on roads in the beginning.
Performance Example:
Navigation of a 10×10 square miles map (the 3rd gallery image) will get generated in 10 seconds and loaded in less than 1 seconds, approximate roads percentage is 10% of the entire map and the generated navigation file size will be 696kb, also all the paths will be found in up to 1 second.
< Above info is gathered by an AMD Ryzen 5 3600XT CPU >
The plugin will receive updates since I’m using it in my own game.
Example Project:
This project contains 2 maps, one’s massive, 10×10 square miles, and the other one is medium size.
It is highly recommended to try this project to see how the settings work and what settings are best for each map.
Download Link
* IMPORTANT NOTE *
Roads cannot cross each other in different heights, like highways. [Not Supported]
Technical Details
The plugin will generate custom navigation data based on user settings then you can do path finding in the generated navigation.
Path finding runs asynchronously in general but you can do path finding on the game thread as well, There are 3 different path finding methods, check out the docs.
Performance was my number 1 priority!
Features:
- Fast
- Optimized
- Flexible
- Multi-threaded
- Customizable
- Stable
- Modular
Code Modules:
- RoadmapNavigation (Runtime)
Number of Blueprints: 1
Number of Widget Blueprints: 3
Number of C++ Classes: 1
Network Replicated: No
Supported Development Platforms: Win64, Win32, MacOS, PS4, Xbox One, Android (Should also work for other platforms)
Supported Target Build Platforms: Win64, Win32, MacOS, PS4, Xbox One, Android (Should also work for other platforms)
Original_Link: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/roadmap-navigation-with-minimap
