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Game Development vocabulary · Level Design

Navmesh

Meaning in game development, with examples

/ˈnævmeʃ/nounAdvanced term

In game development, navmesh means: Short for navigation mesh: a simplified map of the walkable surfaces in a level that game AI uses to find paths and move characters around obstacles.

In Turkish: navmesh, navigasyon ağı, yürünebilir alan ağı

How it is used

Engines build or bake the navmesh from the level geometry. Level designers check it when NPCs get stuck, walk into walls or cannot reach the player. Pathfinding algorithms such as A* run on top of it.

Example sentences

  1. The guards can't reach the roof because the navmesh has a gap near the ladder.

  2. Rebuild the navmesh after you move those crates.

Common collocations

  • bake the navmesh
  • navmesh agent
  • rebuild the navmesh
  • navmesh link
  • NPCShort for non-player character: any character in the game that is controlled by the computer, not by a player, such as a shopkeeper, a quest giver or an enemy guard.
  • bakeTo calculate something expensive, such as lighting, shadows or navigation data, before the game runs and save the result, so it does not need to be computed in real time.
  • level designThe work of creating the spaces a game takes place in, such as maps, missions and stages, and deciding where players go, what they meet and how hard it is.
  • raycastA check in which the game sends an invisible straight line from a point in a direction to find what it hits first. It is used for shooting, line of sight and ground detection.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Level Design

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