Hello to everyone! TechAngel85 here! I'm an Admin from STEP and I need some light shown on something for myself and the community.

With the popularity of http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/65013/ (ICAIO), navmeshes have become a hot topic among a few well-known mod authors.

I'm not here to discussion that mod, it's author, or the like. I would appreciate if you could keep that banter to yourselves. What I am here to discuss are navmeshes.

The ICAIO author seems to be implying that he's found some previous unknown knowledge about navmeshes and AI interaction in Skyrim. It has been implied that there is more to navmeshes than pathing and allowing the NPCs to navigate the environment/terrain which is the basic use of navmeshes. Several well-known authors has examined his mod both in the CK and in TES5Edit. They can not find any evidence to support such a claim. About the only information that has been given by the author is this: "the navigation meshes are also used by the AI for general spatial reasoning and spatially localized information".

My question is, is this true? Is there more to navmeshes than NPC navigation, specifically in Skyrim? Does navmeshing and AI have a deeper connection in Skyrim than simply allowing the NPCs to get to where they're going?

My hope here is that someone from Beth can shine some light on this, so I have sent a PM to a few of the well-knowns here. There is too much misinformation and speculation that I would rather simply get an answer from Beth or the staff here, but I know that is not always possible.

Thank you for your time!

Of all the navmesh topics made in this forum, no one has brought up anything like that. So he knows something that hasn't been documented...

What does "the navigation meshes are also used by the AI for general spatial reasoning and spatially localized information" mean anyway?

No idea...

It's my guess that he's referring to what marker the NPCs choose to use next. But like with most things with this mod, it's just a guess.

And this is basically the claim. His knowledge comes from hours of working and studying the behaviors in the CK and game. I'm not disputing that; which is entirely possible. I would simply like to know how much is true and how much is "fluff".

(I'm in no means an expert, just trying to impart some logic)


From wikipedia on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_ability;

"Spatial ability or visuo-spatial ability is the capacity to understand, reason and remember the spatial relations among objects or space."

Meaning, we as humans, can look around us and determine where we can walk without bumping into things. Just as when we play games, we can direct our character to walk down a path, and not into that tree.


From the CK wiki on http://www.creationkit.com/Bethesda_Tutorial_Navmesh;

"When an area has been built and cluttered, we need to determine where actors can navigate. This is where navmesh comes in. Simply put, a navmesh is a collection of polygons that tells an actor where it can walk.

It's easy to take for granted the amount of information we use when playing. Our brains process every visual detail, constantly drawing conclusions and making predictions. Unfortunately, AI systems are nowhere near advanced as the human brain, and must rely on information we provide. Navmesh is critical to the knowledge an AI actor has about any given space. Quality navmesh is an important factor in helping the AI behave as well as possible."


Clearly it's stating AI has no such spatial ability and we as modders need to give the illusion that they do, so our NPC's can walk down that path and not into that tree. That's the job of navmeshes. There's no actual intelligence in "AI".

So, no, there's no more going on here.

He's just saying the navmesh stops NPCs from running into things and helps them find the markers where they can do certain sandbox actions.

Nothing fancy, nothing extra, just the NavMesh doing what it was intended to do.

The only extra detail that might be relevant is when you set preferred pathing on some triangles and/or when you designate others as water. The preferred path is where the game will attempt to send them down if possible, and will generally only leave that when they're close to where they're going. Water triangles are mainly used to handle AI packages where they're allowed to swim, so that they know where the water is.

The only other aspect that I know of that exists are cover edges, jump markers, and the border edges between cells that have to be set up. All of which is relatively basic stuff for navmeshes in Skyrim. There's nothing deeper going on here since there's no advanced level AI processing happening.