Kicked out the Door: Recast Navigation for .NET and Unity Pro

CAINav is out in the wild.  I kicked it out the door yesterday.

As mentioned in my last post, CAINav gives .NET and Unity Pro users access to almost all of Recast Navigation's features.

It's always fun trying to decide when the first version of new project is ready for release.  Which features to includes is not too difficult.  It just needs to do something useful and do it well.  In CAINav's case, I just had to decide which of Recast Navigation's features to include.  Documentation is another matter.  A project's code and API may be great, but without good documentation its usefulness will be limited.  Especially when the project offers a wide range of complex features.

This release includes API documentation for all features I understand, which is luckily almost all of the mesh generation and pathfinding features. The local steering features are another matter. (Anyone know what 'weightToi' or 'adaptiveDivisions' means?  Me neither. More research needed.) 

Also included is a decent overview of CAINav's structure, some 'getting started' documentation, and a feature explorer application for the pathfinding component.  What I gave up on including in this release is a proper Unity sample/tutorial project.  That's a bummer.  But I can add that over the next month or two.

There are three main reasons CAINav remains in an alpha state:

The local steering features, and some minor features in the other components, need more rigorous automated testing.  Some of these features only have smoke/sanity tests.

I need to add more optimized features.  Low level access is great and necessary.  But there are more efficient ways of marshalling data between the managed code and the native Recast Navigation code.

The Unity Editor ease-of-use components need more work.  I'm not sure how I'm going to implement them all yet, but I'd like to support the more advanced features such as off-mesh connections, areas, and per polygon flags.

Anyway...enjoy, report bugs, ask questions, and don't blame the martians.