Pathfinding in Ember

I've recently done some work on adding proper pathfinding to Worldforge. For this I've chosen the Recast/Detour library. While this approach, using voxel rendering to create navmeshes from arbitrary geometry, is both complex and resource expensive, I'm convinced it's absolutely required to allow us to properly support the dynamic and changing worlds in Worldforge.

I've done the initial implementation in Ember, mainly because it's easier to visually debug. But the main benefit will come from integrating this work into Cyphesis, so that it can control AI movement.
This is an area sorely in need of improvement. See, currently there's no path finding or obstacle avoidance at all for the AI characters. The result of this is that NPC characters always move in a straight line towards their target, causing them to inevitable become stuck on other entities. No good. No good.

With proper path finding and obstacle avoidance we can instead implement more advanced AI behaviour.

Navigation preview

Here's a short preview of the work I've been doing the last couple of days. I'm using Recast/Detour to implement proper navigation in Worldforge, first in Ember and then in Cyphesis.

Ember 0.7.2 binaries for Linux and Windows available

We now have binaries for Linux and Windows available for Ember 0.7.2.

They can be downloaded from here:
Linux (64 bit)
Linux (32 bit)
Windows