Post-Processing NavData

The API of the Gameware Navigation data generation system offers the possibility to access the NavData for each sector at the end of a generation, in order to carry out any custom post-processing that you need to perform for your project.

The typical use for this kind of post-processing phase is to generate NavGraphs for your terrain, which you then package up in your asset pipeline the same way you package up along with the NavMeshes created automatically by the data generation system. See Creating NavGraphs.

If you need to, you could also perform other post-processing steps that involve accessing or querying the NavData you have just created.

Accessing the generated NavData

After a successful call to Generator::Generate(), the GeneratorInputOutput object that you use to set up the generation run also contains references to the generated NavData.

To retrieve this data for a particular sector, you must access a specific GeneratorSector. That can be achieved in two ways:

By keeping track of the sector when you add it to the GeneratorInputOutput, using the return value of GeneratorInputOutput::AddSector().
By retrieving it from the GeneratorInputOutput using GeneratorInputOutput::GetSectorWithName() or GeneratorInputOutput::GetSectorWithGuid().

Once you have access to a sector, you can retrieve its NavData by calling GeneratorSector::GetNavData(). Note that this method returns KY_NULL if:

The Generator has not yet been run since this sector was created, or since the sector was loaded from a .GenIO file.
The Generator has been run, but this sector was flagged to exclude it from data generation. See Selecting Which Sectors to Rebuild.

Not that this NavData has not yet been added to any Database. If you want to be able to run queries on the NavMesh, you must create a World, link the NavData with a Database in that World by calling NavData::Initialize(), and add it by calling NavData::AddToDatabaseImmediate().

Example

For a code example that shows how to use a post-process to create a NavGraph, see the Tutorial_Generation_postProcess.cpp file.