I am developing a gameplay system for a unit type that has the ability to teleport. In addition to the simple situation of just being able to teleport between navmesh areas, which is easily covered by regular nav links, there are other intermediate teleportation destinations that will typically not be on the navmesh. Locations like perch positions on top of thin poles or walls that aren’t substantial enough to reliably have navmesh generated on top of them, or may even not be supported, like being attached to a wall, or suspended from a ceiling.. The behavior at these locations will largely be static, but being able to connect them as basically a graph of nav links is really the only sensible way to seamlessly maintain the functionality of the pathfinding in finding shortest paths and such through a complex graph of these teleportation points. I want to avoid a situation where I can only navlink the navmesh connected points, and have to hack in some navigational substate just to handle the traversal through the link graph.
Are there any options I have here? The engine doesn’t really provide a mechanism to supplement pathfinding with alternate search sections, and I know from prior experience it’s a big annoying rabbit hole to try and do that anyways. It’s far better to normalize the off mesh graph as a series of connected link edges, so pathfinding just works, but without a normal navmesh anchor area for them to snap to, it seems like this isn’t doable out of the box.
Ideas? Thanks