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Author Topic: Pathfinding????  (Read 2202 times)

evmo

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Pathfinding????
« on: March 12, 2018, 02:50:07 PM »
Hello!

I've been messing around with Unity's pathfinding system and have had a lot of success with it (all PlayMaker of course!). My enemies are patrolling around, jumping gaps, chasing you on sight, and losing you if you hide for long enough where they will then go back to patrolling.

I keep reading that the built in pathfinding system is sub-par and very limited, however all these posts seem to be very old and Unity has been updated quite a few times since then.

My question is, what is everyone using for pathfinding and is there a good reason to not be using the built in one? Thanks!

Tzian

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Re: Pathfinding????
« Reply #1 on: March 12, 2018, 04:02:51 PM »
bookmarking this as i too am interested to find out what folks prefer to use,

i have also seen many comments  about the inbuilt Unity system being sub par and also that the way to go is the A* Pathfinding project, but as evmo said these comments are a fair ways old so could be completely wrong by now.

tcmeric

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Re: Pathfinding????
« Reply #2 on: March 12, 2018, 09:22:59 PM »
I have experience with both systems. Unless you are specifically looking for a feature that only a* provides, there is no reason to switch. Or if you are trying to pathfind many many gameobjects (like 50 plus at one time).

One thing a* provided in the past, was a way to regenerate the navmesh at run time. Now you can do this with the experimental features of unity navmesh as well.

A* can have better performance, as it has several types of pathfinding, but it is much more work to setup, and IMO, that performance only pays off, if you have many objects moving at once.

evmo

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Re: Pathfinding????
« Reply #3 on: March 12, 2018, 11:01:30 PM »
I have experience with both systems. Unless you are specifically looking for a feature that only a* provides, there is no reason to switch. Or if you are trying to pathfind many many gameobjects (like 50 plus at one time).

One thing a* provided in the past, was a way to regenerate the navmesh at run time. Now you can do this with the experimental features of unity navmesh as well.

A* can have better performance, as it has several types of pathfinding, but it is much more work to setup, and IMO, that performance only pays off, if you have many objects moving at once.

Awesome, thanks!  We have A* at work.  I loaded it into a project but had no clue where to go from there.  I got everything working I needed with the stock pathfinding system just by reading the basics they have in the Unity documentation and screwing around in PlayMaker for a few hours. I found it very intuitive and user-friendly.

I don't anticipate having more than 50 pathfinders in a scene at once so this should fit the bill!