Autodesk Gameware Navigation is a middleware for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in 3D video games and simulations: it helps your computer-controlled characters (NPCs) find and follow paths from place to place in the 3D world, avoiding collisions with each other and with other dynamic obstacles; and it provides spatial analysis tools for getting information about the 3D world.

The Gameware Navigation plug-in adds the following capabilities to 3ds Max Interactive:

• You can automatically create navigation meshes for your levels in the interactive editor.
• You can spawn bots in the engine at runtime, and make them find and follow paths from place to place in the level.
• In your Lua or Flow code, you can conduct high-performance spatial queries against the navigation data, and use the results to drive gameplay.

The best way to learn about Navigation in 3ds Max Interactive is to get your hands on the example projects for Flow and Lua. Open them from the Online Projects tab of the Project Manager, or download the projects here!

For more information about Gameware Navigation, see:

• The Autodesk Gamedev portal
• The complete Gameware Navigation documentation.