Recast Navigation is an open source toolkit designed for building navigation meshes and performing pathfinding in 3D environments, particularly for video games and simulations. It provides a set of libraries that transform input geometry into navigation meshes that AI agents can use to move through virtual worlds. Its core component, Recast, constructs navigation meshes by rasterizing triangle meshes into voxels, filtering out areas that are not walkable, and converting the remaining regions into polygon meshes suitable for navigation. Detour complements this system by providing runtime pathfinding, spatial queries, and navigation utilities that allow agents to move efficiently across the generated mesh. Recast Navigation also includes modules such as DetourCrowd for crowd simulation and agent collision avoidance, as well as DetourTileCache for streaming and dynamically updating navigation meshes in large or changing environments.
Features
- Generates navigation meshes automatically from arbitrary 3D geometry
- Provides pathfinding and spatial queries through the Detour library
- Supports tiled navigation meshes for large or dynamic environments
- Includes crowd simulation and agent collision avoidance systems
- Allows streaming and dynamic updates of navigation mesh tiles
- Includes debugging utilities and a demo application for testing navigation systems