Conspicuous lack of Recast and Detour Documentation?

Community Community & Industry Discussion
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Is there really not any documentation other than raw API documentation for using recast/detour? It feels like so many people have issues making use of a 3D/flying navmesh that they end up reinventing the wheel or creating their own A* and/or octree implementation instead of using the Recast/Detour components that are natively available.

Am I missing something? Is there some common/assumed documentation everyone “just knows”? …or is it really so lightly documented that creating one’s own A* and/or octree system is faster/easier/etc? I am not necessarily opposed to creating my own, it just feels weird to have a fairly powerful navigation and pathfinding system that is ignored in favor of naive/simple implementations.

EDIT: I should clarify that I’m referring to a solution(s) that uses the builtin systems in a relatively simple fashion. It feels strange to have so many full-featured systems/subsystems, but we have to ignore it all to create 3D path finding that includes Z-axis movement (read: flying).

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Making flying characters is not particularly hard with the built-in system. The main challenge is that a flying character can go anywhere; there’s very few areas they need to avoid!

What many games do for “flying” is to actually do the navigation on the ground, but then translate the character up in the air. A game like Starcraft II shows off this method, for example. The “flyer” may be able to traverse kinds of terrain that “walkers” cannot, but that’s not that different from “walkers” being able to traverse terrain that “swimmers” cannot.

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