>"Large-scale outdoor urban environments, crowded with people and vehicles, are difficult to simulate accurately in videogames—just ask CD Projekt. A huge number of moving parts is required to make the scenes believable, but the more that number goes up, the more likely it is that something, somewhere, is going to go spectacularly haywire.A new patent filing from Take-Two Interactive, prosaically entitled "System And Method For Virtual Navigation In A Gaming Environment," offers a glimpse at what may be the first big steps toward changing all that. It begins with a breakdown of how navigation in gaming environments currently works, through pathfinding along linked nodes based on pre-programmed instructions, and then gets into the limitations of these systems and the many ways that they can go wrong: Cars programmed with "wandering behavior," for instance, may not take into account external factors like traffic, weather, or the need to actually find a spot to pull into rather than just yoinking it into "park" in the middle of the street."