Recast's out-of-the-box navigation features are a good baseline and suitable for many games. However, most companies need to make significant modifications to make Recast's navigation solution work for their game. While these modifications might work for one project, they might not be suitable for the next. In this talk we showcase how we built an extendable and reusable custom navigation stack that leverages Recast. We start with an overview of Recast, its use in the industry, and its strengths and shortcomings. Then we explore how to utilise Recast as part of a larger framework by breaking the generation process into individual steps that form a tile generation pipeline. This leads to a discussion of how you can extend this pipeline by adding additional steps and exploit the data Recast generates. In particular, perform heightmap analysis to create automated cover points and automated navigation link generation. Finally we present how you can create multiple navigation meshes into a single navigation mesh system to encode additional constraints and costing information. We demonstrate everything we present with videos in Unreal Engine.
