A whistle-stop tour of some game-engine collision/pathfinding background, how modern engines work, how old engines work, and how I'm applying a mixed-approach in my game.
Could you expand on how your pathfinding works for both ground-based and flying enemies? I've been trying to wrap my head around how to handle this on my own game, and trying not to invent a wholly separate solution for enemies than can avoid obstacles vertically.
Big obstacles are just built from the scaffold itself, and small obstacles are avoidable by just doing "whisker-traces" to veer around them (the navigation path is a movement hint used to calculate accelerations, not followed strictly).
Yes, but that's why ~~good~~ fun enemy AI for games is both an art and a science.
My approach is that the path from the pathfinding algorithm is just a known good solution. The path the agent gets back from the algorithm doesn't have to be just a list of Vector3's for the window centers. It could get back a list of each window quad instead, and then aim for a random point in the next quad shifted by the distance between the two quads. You can also do some raycasts from each agent occasionally to do local-avoidance-type behavior (which you'll likely have to do anyway so that enemies spread out a bit and avoid non-static geometry).
To that end, you could always encode the rule of what side of a window to aim for? Something you probably want to do if you are going to be aiming for bidirectional agents going through them?