Kythera AI
Advanced Surface Navigation AI
NPCs can climb walls, cross ceilings and move across any surface, turning naturally to match whatever they’re clinging to. It’s built for wall-crawling spiders, ceiling-lurking monsters, and anything else that ignores gravity.
Movement across every surface, not just the ground
Some NPCs don't respect gravity. A spider that climbs the wall and keeps going across the ceiling doesn't treat the floor as the only place it can walk. For an NPC like that, "the ground" isn't a flat plane underneath it but whatever surface it happens to be clinging to. Kythera's Surface Navigation lets NPCs navigate any surface – floors, walls, ceilings, and everything in between – as naturally as a ground NPC crosses open terrain.
What Kythera’s Surface Navigation can do
Navigate any surface
Surface Navigation is built on a dedicated Surface Navigation Mesh that wraps floors, walls, ceilings, overhangs, and complex geometry. A character can move seamlessly from the floor, up a wall, and across a ceiling without the world having to be flat beneath it.
Characters that orient to the surface
Where a ground character always stands upright, a surface character can be oriented in any direction, turning to match the surface as it moves across the mesh. It can rotate freely as it moves between surfaces, so the mesh generator treats it as a sphere, and it stays anchored to whatever it's standing on rather than being pulled to the floor. Movement across walls and ceilings reads the way it should.
Pathfinding tuned for curved, 3D space
Finding clean routes across a mesh that bends around corners and over surfaces is harder than doing it on flat ground. Kythera adds a bespoke path-straightening step for exactly this, so routes across a fully 3D mesh look smooth and deliberate rather than stair-stepped or stuck to the edges of polygons.
A generation pipeline built for full 3D
Conventional navigation-mesh generation is designed for humanoid characters on floors, slopes and stairs, and by design it won't cover walls and ceilings. Surface Navigation introduces an entirely new generation pipeline, along with extensions to the underlying navigation system, to produce a fully 3D Navigation Mesh across arbitrarily oriented surfaces.
What this means for your game
Characters that treat the whole environment as walkable – a wall-crawling enemy, or a creature that waits on the ceiling until the player walks underneath. Every surface in your level becomes somewhere a character can go.