How would I go about building my own navmesh/ navigation system?

I’ve been looking around trying to learn about pathing (A*). I’ve realized that my game concept requires me to do something that Unreal doesn’t do, at least not right out of the box. In my game concept I need to be able to have characters walk on the walls/ ceiling. Navmesh in UE4 doesn’t create past 89 degree slope. I’ve had to turn off standard gravity and devise my own method for having characters walk around on the walks/ ceiling. Now it’s time to create some sort of pathing for my AI. IT seems that using a navmesh is a pretty effective way of doing this. So I guess I need to create some test mesh out of quads that has area the AI can walk to and areas that are hollowed out that it cannot. At this point I’m not interested in the minutia, I’m sure I have plenty to learn in terms of the actual a* algorithm and there is plenty of content online for that. What I’m interested in is the beginning steps that one would take in getting it started in UE4. I’m not a very good programmer but I really love the BP system in Unreal. I’ve already had a great deal of success getting things setup using that. Would it be possible to devise a nevmesh/ pathing system entirely through blue print? It sounds to me like the basics are having a mesh of quads and cataloging it into node states of open or closed. Then using some expanding logic to identify which nodes are good/ bad, doing this until the target path is identified.

I wouldn’t be so keen on switching to an A* based approach for many reasons.

As an alternative solution, you may try to use the existing NavMesh capabilities with new approaches. You don’t need the NavMesh to actually perceive a wall as a floor; you can put a pseudo-floor next to that wall through which characters can pass. You can achieve the wall-running effect if you couple it with a trigger volume to change animations to wall-running instead of regular running.

Hi Thumper,

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Thank you.