What's new in LCM Nav3D 3.4.1

Release 3.4.1 supports Unreal Engine 5.2 to 5.8. Each engine version has its own build of the plugin, so install the one that matches your project.

New

• Fish schooling. Turn on Schooling on a Mass crowd or on a pawn's Flight Movement component and it steers as a school: personal space, collision anticipation, heading matching, and turning away from rocks and glass before reaching them. A few informed fish lead the rest, a predator sets off a fountain escape that spreads through the school, and fish swim in bursts and glides. Distances are in body lengths, so it works at any scale. See Mass traits and Fish schooling on pawns.
• Hold Avoidance and Contact Push for Mass crowds. Hold Avoidance Between Scans keeps separation on every frame, not every other one. Contact Push pushes apart bodies that overlap, including agents that have arrived, so a crowd no longer piles onto its goal.

Changed

• City demo maps (Behavior Tree, StateTree and Mass) have new building facades, detailed trees and rooftop equipment. Collision and navigation are unchanged, and the maps use nothing outside the plugin.
• FlyTo's wall-avoidance whiskers no longer take nearby agents for walls; agent avoidance handles them. Set r.LcmNav.WallAvoidIgnorePawns 0 for the old behaviour.

Fixes

• Mass agents froze against rocks and walls. A crowd agent pushed off the flow field's covered space stopped and never moved again. It now steers back to the nearest covered point, and a still agent is still pushed out of solid.
• Hitch when spawning agents at runtime. Agents spawned while the game runs were registered as dynamic obstacles, and every one of them cost a navigation rebuild. Navigating agents are no longer dynamic obstacles.

LCM Nav3D 3.4.0

Release 3.4.0 supports Unreal Engine 5.2 to 5.8. Each engine version has its own build of the plugin, so install the one that matches your project.

New

• Cost areas and query filters. Mark volumes as storms, preferred lanes, toll gates or no-fly zones with stock NavArea classes, and every planner routes by them: FlyTo (Behavior Tree and StateTree), Fly To Location, Mass crowds, Find Path and the stock Move To. A stock Navigation Query Filter on an agent decides what each area costs that agent, or forbids it, so two agents read the same volume differently. Moving areas are supported. See Cost areas and query filters.
• Stock Move To and EQS plan through LCM Nav3D. The navigation proxy now registers for a real Supported Agent, and reports whether it did. See Stock Move To and EQS.
• Fly To Location, a Blueprint node that flies a pawn with no Behavior Tree, StateTree or AI Controller. See Fly To Location.
• Find Path Detailed tells a complete route from one that stops short of the goal in a streamed world, and the query option Require Complete Path makes a partial route fail instead.
• FlyTo Timeout Seconds (Behavior Tree and StateTree): report Failed after a set time in flight.
• Stay Running After Resolve on Find Cover, Chunk Prewarm and Streaming Aware (Find Actor By Tag and Pick Random Goal already had it), so a StateTree task that finishes at once no longer ends the FlyTo beside it.
• New demo maps, on the demo menu in Behavior Tree, StateTree and Mass versions: Cost Areas and Cost Areas, Streamed (six labelled stations), and Fish Tank (a 120 cm aquarium navigated at 1 cm).

Changed

• The plugin sets mass.FullyParallel 0 at startup. It avoids a UE 5.2 Mass phase-order ensure that froze the editor for seconds, and it was also faster at 10,000 agents. It never overrides a value you set; to opt out, use r.LcmNav.Mass.SerialPhases 0.
• A Mass crowd's first flow field is built off the game thread, so a crowd spawning into a streamed world no longer costs one long frame.
• A FlyTo with no route to its goal logs a Warning, not an Error.
• Editor: every LCM Nav3D actor and component has its own icon in the Outliner and the Place Actors panel, and a What's New window opens once after each update, with buttons that open the new demo maps and guides. Reopen it from the Nav3D toolbar menu.
• The demo HUD shows the plugin's current version.

Fixes

• Packaged sample project: a packaged build started on an empty screen, because the demo menu and its maps were not cooked. The menu and every demo map are now included.
• Vertical jitter with the Context-Based and Linear avoidance styles.
• Stock Move To never reached LCM Nav3D, although the log said the proxy was registered.
• Compiler warnings: the plugin builds with no warnings on every supported engine version.

LCM Nav3D 3.3.0

Release 3.3.0 supports Unreal Engine 5.2 to 5.8. Each engine version has its own build of the plugin, so install the one that matches your project.

New

• A rebuilt agent task library for Behavior Tree, StateTree and Mass: Take Off, Hover, Land, Orbit, Look At, Turn In Place, Move To And Face, Follow Target (Escort), Patrol and Use Smart Object, plus Find Actor By Tag. Patrol now follows routed paths instead of straight lines. Property lists are in the API Reference, and Look At explains when to use the plugin's rotation tasks instead of the stock one.
• Small worlds. Voxels down to 1 cm, a World Scale setting for tiny agents, and a Leaves padding mode. New tutorial: Small Worlds.
• Streaming rebuilds. In an infinite world, when a level streams in after its area was already built, navigation for that area is rebuilt automatically. Three console variables control it; see Infinite World.

Fixes

• UE 5.4 to 5.8: buildings and other triangle-mesh collision could be missing from the navigation voxels, so agents flew through them.
• UE 5.6 to 5.8: GPU voxelization could return incomplete navigation data. Results now match the CPU voxelizer, and Voxelization Method Auto uses the GPU on every engine version.
• UE 5.4 and 5.5: turning on Draw Debug Volumes crashed the engine.
• All versions: simple (convex) collision was missing from GPU voxelization.
• UE 5.7: the standalone game could crash on World Partition demo maps with landscapes.
• Fly To: a move that ends early now clears its guidance, and failure cooldown and final-approach settling are more reliable.
• Crowds: agents no longer slip through walls at chunk borders, and open-world crowds no longer get stuck on stale route data.
• Demo maps: Dynamic Obstacles and Mixed Indoor/Outdoor fixed.

Documentation and licence

• The manual, the quick start and every chapter are updated for 3.3.0, including the new task library.
• The EULA is updated to version 3.3.0.