ABSTRACT
Climbing over obstacles like walls, ledges, or ladders plays a supporting role in video games: they are not usually central to the experience, but they stand out when done poorly or omitted entirely. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule, games like Mirror’s Edge [EA 08] or Tomb Raider [CD 14] that make the climbing sections, so called traversal, the core gameplay element. Traversal makes the AI navigation more complicated: it requires additional markup and programming for the AI to understand how to mount a ladder or jump over a wall, not to mention special animation states to control their location as they jump, vault, climb, or swim. As a result, video games with very complex or varied AI characters tend to avoid climbing altogether. Instead, AI navigation [Snook 00] is usually limited to finding paths on a continuous mesh [Mononen 12], where the actors can walk or run everywhere they need to go.
