How can i use triangle picking to determine the exact location of a triangle in world space coordinates?

Question

Im trying to implement point and click movement in my game, but at the moment im stumped about how i can select parts of a mesh for the player to walk to.

So what ive done is ive got a navigational mesh in my game, i can select points from it, but what i want to do is be able to select the navigational mesh in real time and be able to tell the player where to go on the navigational Mesh, how can i achieve this?

I thought triangle-picking might be one way to determine where im selecting the mesh with mouse unproject but i think i need a bit more accuracy than that, no?

How can i achieve point and click on a navigational mesh in real time?

Thanks

Answer 1

In theory your navigation mesh should be fairly sparse with a few big triangles. Ray/triangle intersection is also fairly fast if you don't have many triangles. The best approach is likely to simply fire a ray from the camera through the cursor and see if it intersects any of the triangles from your nav-mesh, and if so, tell the player to move there.