Detect when AI is off Navmesh

Development Programming & Scripting AI
1

Hey all,
I’m looking for common solutions for detecting an AI has gotten off the navmesh. Simplest example: The player has knocked them onto a nook on a cliff, so that they can stand up, but the terrain is too uneven for any navmesh to generate there.

Let’s say I’m OK with just killing the enemy off at that point.

But there doesn’t seem to be anything in the engine for me to know if they’ve gotten off the navmesh other than projecting their current location to the navmesh, which I’d prefer not to have to do frequently.

In addition, it seems like even if I wait for a MoveTo to fail, I won’t know why it failed.

So any help would be appreciated. I think this is a fairly common problem, so I’m surprised at how difficult it seems to be to find answers.

2

A crazy thought appeared. If you need the NPC to survive a fall and be able to continue searching for the player using navigation, you can calculate the nearest landing point on NavMesh at the moment of the jump. Thus, the trajectory of the NPC’s fall will be set along a parabola towards the desired point. If the point is found, the character will survive; if not, it is easier to kill or prohibit the jump.
If an NPC falls into an area where there is basically no navigation, is there any point in finding out whether there is one or not?)))