Pathfinding - Pending changes

[Christien Wycliffe]

We have turned pathfinding off on both of our sims, but keep getting a message saying the navmesh has pending updates. I know this shows up when terraforming is done, but what else might trigger this to happen?

The only people who have terraform abilities are the estate managers, and none of them are making any changes to the land. Since no one else has the ability to terraform, what other things might cause the navmesh to need to be rebaked?

[Hitomi Tiponi]

I believe that moving or deleting objects in the navmesh will also affect it.

[Nalates Urriah]

Hitomi is right. However, I'll say it differently and expand a bit.

Enableing or Disabling does not disable all that much of Pathfinding (PF). It was designed to be very light on server load. So, the enable is more like enabling or disabling land's build permissions. It mostly just turns off the ability for PF AI Characters to run on the land. All the rest of PF is apparently still there and running.

The result is if you or anyone move anythng that touches the ground or rez or delete any prims at ground level, the Navmesh will attempt or at least plan to update and give you a notice the Navmesh is out of date. This is only a status change where a flag is set. You can ignore it. It should clear in 10 minutes or so.

I am not certain whether the flag is set when you move things at altitude, like in a skybox.

If you do not have AI Characters running around, the Navmesh being out of date is moot. It just does not matter. 

I suspect they will eventually have to change the button to be less annoying. 

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

The impression I have is that the Navmesh is used for all physical objects, vehicles as well as PF characters. Avatars as well? I don't know. There's certainly been enough talk about changes in vehicle behavior. We had to have the Physics change to make Pathfinding possible, but with everything happening at once it's hard to see a boundary line.

[Hitomi Tiponi]

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Nalates Urriah wrote:

I am not certain whether the flag is set when you move things at altitude, like in a skybox.

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Changing things in the navmesh at altitude does suggest a rebake - I know, I regularly do it in our 'village' at 3900.

 

[Christien Wycliffe]

Thank you everyone for the informative responses. Since reading this feedback I have been trying to watch more closely what triggers the message to popup, and you are all correct. Rezzing a prim on a "floor" has triggered it, as well as moving various objects. No big deal in and of itself, however I am also noticing a major hit to region performance when this happens.

As soon as the message for rebake triggers, the regions time dilation, FPS, and physics FPS fluctuate heavily. I will keep an eye out and see if I can pinpoint other reasons for this, as I'm not sure it's not a coincidence with teleports in and out quite yet. What I do know, the message isn't going away at all unless the rebake is performed, and once the rebake is performed the region performance returns to normal.

As I said, I will continue my observations since there are any number of things that could be happening at the same time and post back here if I find any other correlations. Thanks again for the help!

[Christien Wycliffe]

To add an observation to this... I am noticing that when someone changes the stream information in about land it is triggering the notification for a navmesh rebake. Also, the notice isn't going away until the sim is either restarted or a rebake is done.

Any ideas as to why changing the music stream would cause a change to the navmesh?