Pathfinding alternatives?

You’d think a billion dollar company would make a somewhat decent pathfinding framework, but nope. It’s the definition of rubbish.

I’ve invested hours and hours of work into a new game that relies heavily on a functional AI that tracks you down in a large map. Pathfinding service sucks, it will not do anything at this point.

Do I have any alternatives at all? Only thing I can think of is node mapping the entire map, but I have no clue how to have it navigate the nodes to the player in that way.

Any help appreciated, thanks.

3 Likes

What is your problem with the built-in pathfinding? Implementing your own custom pathfinding is a huge undertaking, and as far as I know there are almost no open-source projects for this.

But, if you’re set on using a completely different navigation system, you could use the A* algorithm to find a path from a set of nodes, but it will require you to manually place down said nodes or figure out a way to automate it.

I’m pretty screwed, it’s performing terribly for me, I have no way of modifying the nav mesh so it’s more consistent, and so on. The rig constantly clips on corners of objects and gets stuck all the time, even with a radius of 1 on the agent parameters.

Yeah, just have no clue how to actually make an implementation.

Yeah, I also had an issue with the navmesh, I even requested access to the navmesh in a feature request. This was before there were pathfinding modifiers. However, the response I got was that pathfinding modifiers were coming soon, and they have no intention of giving access to the navmesh. Though if you have a particular use case perhaps you could add to the feature request.

Go figure.

Heh, yeah right. It’s been on hold for months now.

They really don’t have any desire to lighten developers’ workloads at all I suppose.

I’ve made my own implementation with A*. Though for what you seem to be wanting is an HPA* or hierarchical pathfinding. The issue I experienced with this was creating the path for elevation and pathfinding links.

Let alone being able to actually get to the hierarchy implementation of it. Was pretty cool to work on though. As far as the developers work load is. Have you seen the video marketplace?

1 Like

Default characters have a radius of 2, and lowering it will only create more clipping?

1 Like

An Idea I just thought of, but could you not make some generic pathfinding that works in a radius, then leave breadcrumbs from players to be sort of “trace”. Similar to something from Alien: Isolation.

Basically, a director AI sends the main agent to the player’s location, but the AI itself still has to rely on it’s behavior tree senses to track and find the player.

To elaborate, the breadcrumbs could be A* nodes, that way you still get fairly “smort” pathfinding. The nodes themselves could degrade over time.

1 Like

My hopes of doing that was it make it so less space is required for path computation between objects, and yet it still fails to compute on occasion.

I can’t tell, it seems more functional now when I move it in a random direction when the path fails to compute, it does seem to work actually.

There’s just too many roadblocks. It’s like pulling teeth to sculpt the nav mesh in a certain area to enable for better navigation for the AI (because it apparently ignores collision groups…)

1 Like

Wish I could help but I’m stuck in the same boat. I have tons of issues with Roblox pathfinding and I have no idea why. It should work in theory but everything always goes horribly wrong. I don’t know if it’s a user error or just Roblox having a terrible pathfinding api.
The only thing I can find is people giving up and attempting to make their own.

1 Like