Hi, currently my pathfinding for my enemies simply involve moving to the left or right and jumping when a raycast hits a wall. I’d like to create smarter enemies that pathfind to the Player. Could anybody point me in the correct direction, or show me a solution they have implemented? I’m using A* for enemies that float around, but i’m not sure how to apply it to enemies with gravity and the ability to jump. I’m using a procedurally generated tilemap that the player can modify at runtime so it will need to be able to update during runtime as well.
I did some research on A* and it seems its not really suited for this sort of thing (the creator even said so himself).
Not sure what the state of the art solution looks like, but one way to do it would be the following:
As you said, A* works fine for flying enemies, or labyrinths on the ground. This is because it expects a grid to work with.
If you took your initial tileset and generated one internal representation of that, where additional blocking tiles are spawned according to the jumpheight of your enemies, then the result would be a grid including all actually passable paths for your enemies. A* could then be used to calculate a path from your enemy to its target. When walking down the path, the enemy just needs to jump at the right location to make it to the end. In a tile based game jumpHeight can be rounded to full tiles for this. You would also need to include (at least a very basic) gravity into this, so enemies can go downwards at all. Similar to jumping, you could just act as if it’s a downwards jump which they are allowed to make as long as they wont take falldamage from it.