Regions with Cost to Traverse

In some situations it is desirable to represent regions of the world that are not physically obstructed, but that pathfinding agents should for some reason prefer not to cross.
Examples are regions that are physically difficult to cross, such as mud patches or difficult terrain, and regions that are perceived by the agent to be dangerous in some way.

PathEngine provides two ways of representing these kinds of regions.
'Soft obstacle' functionality enables you to represent obstacles in the same way as the traditional 'hard obstacles'.
Instead of completely blocking movement, 'soft obstacles' instead add a cost to any sections of path that cross over the obstacle.
Soft obstacles can then be moved around, included in collision contexts, and so on.
It is also possible to associate movement costs directly with regions on the base mesh.
This is handled in terms of assigned costs to regions marked with a given surface type.

A path through an environment with 'soft obstacles'.

Further details

Further details about representing regions with cost to traverse can be found here.