[pbmax]

oh yeah, terrain... you don't think a kd-tree would work well? i've done some research on this. i've found an interesting ray tracing algorithm that use kd-trees for optimization. the kd-tree is combined with a heuristic that maximizes empty spaces (convex hulls). this is different then most trees because the hueristic makes the tree unbalanced which normally you don't want. but for ray tracing (and pathfinding?) this results in a large performance increase.

i emailed jan Paul a few weeks ago about various pathfinding methods. he hinted that ideally, i should use a method that fully represents the configuration space in 3d. i think this would eliminate navmeshes and other 2d (or 2.5d) methods.

i dunno if he was referring to quake wars or thier new game, but it seemed to me that he thought navigation in 3 dimensions is important. this would make sense for quake wars since it has numerous flying vehicles and flying npc's.

he also said that he is ditching the q3 aas for another technique. now i'm all confused! lol.

i'm going to check out probabilistic roadmaps, a pathfinding method used quite a bit in robotics.... this is starting to drive me crazy.