[Full Release] Introducing the Pathfinding Links for NPCs

I’ve been playing with this recently and I am really enjoying it. So far it works completely as intended but I would like some customisation over how the visualisation is displayed.

If I have a tall wall that I would like my NPC to jump over, I’d prefer to have the link curve show over the wall, and not to go through it.

Example:
image

Also an “AlwaysOnTop” property would be nice as well (mainly for the label).

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Oh my gosh this is awesome! I need to know if it’s possible to reference either of the two attachments when you hit a link though. For example, when the NPC gets to the Start Attachment of the link, is it possible for me to know the End Attachment of the link without hardcoding it?

If this isn’t possible, you should really make it a feature so we don’t have to hard-code all the portals or ladders in every map of our game.

Can links with the same labels share multiple attachments?

Like for example if I allow NPCs to use a elevator that can go on multiple floors (let’s say there’s 25 floors) can I make 25 links with each of them having the elevator as the start position?

Also, will there some type of equivalent script event like Blocked for pathfinding links or some type of unique pathfinding ID table list if a label is used? For example, if multiple NPCs are pathfinding to a elevator that’s on a timer and the elevator shuts down/blows up (lol) suddenly, what could I use to tell the NPCs that are currently pathfinding to the elevator to stop and use the stairs or another elevator? Seems like the only way you could do this is to loop through every single NPC’s waypoints to see if that waypoint label is being used which can be a lot of looping.

I do not understand how every time I try to make an AI that can move, it always stutters. Even using the official ROBLOX article, it stutters. Making AI has been rough…

Set WaypointDistance in your AgentParameters to math.huge.

Hey developers,

Thank you so much for sharing feedback throughout this beta. This feature is now live and available for use in production!

Let us know if you have any questions or feedback.

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Hi! Regarding [Full Release] Introducing the Pathfinding Links for NPCs - #40 by Chrystian_PPP, will it be fixed?

Is it normal that it’s not showing the circles anymore to be able to see if the pathfinding link is projected correctly? I just can’t get them to work with ladders and my pathfinder completely ignores the pathfinding link even though I included the same Label inside the “Costs”.

Here the SpawnLocation is the “goal”. (It’s at the top of the window) But my path status is “NoPath” whenever It tries to pathfind to it. Here is a video:

Did I do anything wrong?

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Hi, Could you please log a bug report for this. If possible attach the file as well so that we can reproduce the issue

Thank you for responding! Here’s the place file: (It includes all my scripts)
PathfindingLinks.rbxl (54.1 KB) I have the most recent roblox studio version and I use a mac. I just started testing with pathfinding links so I don’t know if this is a bug or just something I did wrong. I have all the Visualization settings ON in Studio Settings. I don’t use teamcreate. My mac is on version 12.2.1

I just noticed that I didn’t anchor the Truss shown in the video. However, after anchoring the truss it still didn’t function correctly. I have 2 ladders in my place and both don’t work.

Hi, Thanks for reporting the issue. The problem here is the attachment are parented to the part which has property CanCollide = false. If you enable the CanCollide property of the two parts , you should see pathfinding link working and path getting generated correctly. You could also create attachment on top of the wall and at the base plate (bottom wall) and link those in pathfinding link instance.

P.S I updated the New Instance: PathfindingLink subsection in this post to reflect this.

2 Likes

This is amazing, truly a one-up from you guys. Keep those great updates coming!

Is there any plans to expand the properties of PathWaypoint such that we can extract which PathfindingLink object the specific waypoint is referring to? There are situations where just ‘Label’ is not enough information for the action.
I’ve automated my generator to setup PathfindingLink objects with the label ‘ClimbObstacle’ on terrain that fits a certain criteria, but I can’t determine which two attachments to execute the movement between without iterating through all of the attachments for that area and doing a magnitude check per NPC, which imo shouldn’t be necessary.

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The feature is good, but the implementation doesnt have any sense at all, you are giving me the example of “using a boat” but in a new place where there’s only one boat parented in workspace and searching it like workspace.BoatModel, you will never have a single boat in your game, and even if you do, you dont want hardcode the location, the current “fix” for this is set the label to Boat1, Boat2, Boat3 and create a subsystem to bind it like Name/Object, which is quite a smelly solution and adds more work, same problem for teleporters or door opening which are 99% of the use cases.

A property Waypoint.Link would fix that, but it’s something I would’ve expected at start tbh

14 Likes

Bump. This is seriously needed as a change.

1 Like

I’ve been searching why my links aren’t working and turns out it was because my links are CanCollide off. I cannot find this caveat anywhere in this post or in the documentations. Unless there already is and I missed something.

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DEVS WE NEED THIS PLEAAASSSEEE. The feature is great but loses its use unless you can tell the script which door to open or which boat to activate or which teleporter to use

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Also bump on this reply, feature is basically not as useful as it blatantly could be lacking this property

Yeah, just tried out using this and found out it’s missing a key component to identify which PathfindingLink the Waypoint is referring to.

If I were to have a portal with multiple links from Origin A to Destination B,C,D, etc… I would have to make a unique identifying Label to determine where to go, that isn’t extensible enough at scale. I have hundreds of doorway portals all over my game.

An additional waypoint property Link that reference to the PathfindingLink instance would be very helpful as @PepeElToro41 suggested since it’s got a lot of information such as Origin and Destination attachments, the Parent of the PathfindingLink, etc…

Hope this gets an update soon.

1 Like