I want to learn this navmesh pathfinding stuff. There are a lot of people around here with solutions, and while some people have provided great links, I’m sure I could learn faster if the educational material was Unity-based. If nothing like this exists, what do you recommend? Read the material from those links, and try to deconstruct Aron Granberg’s project?
No tutorials on the matter, cause Unity does not offer any kind of path finding.
People doing tutorials (or better articles) on the materia itself will not waste any time to do it in context of a technology as thats of no use for 95% of your readers. Technology focused tutorials only make sense in relation to stuff in or addons for that technology.
Question is what you are looking for in detail.
If its learning about Nav Mesh path finding and related topics in general then AIGameDev.net definitely is a good start with the materia and example implementations too.
That way you can learn about nav meshes and path finding and then later on apply the knowledge to whatever you want including unity
If you made a tutorial called “A* Navmesh Pathfinding with Unity”, I think 95% of your audience would be people using Unity, wanting to learn about navmeshes and pathfinding. I don’t believe you can make a successful tutorial about technology, without using a technological tool to demonstrate it. For example, this tutorial has C++ example code. I don’t know how to see that in action. I can probably get something out of reading the source code, but that’s not very effective learning.
That’s unfortunately backwards for my situation. If I had done that in my younger days, your advice would be excellent. And I hope to get to that point again. But for now, I’ve got a terrible time-sucking job and a lot of debt, so I need material that will teach me quickly, allow me to escape my misery via making sellable things, so I can dive into more general mastery afterwards.
You’ve been here a long time as I have, you know that the average math level here is not even on the level where Vector math can be assumed and there you have the hope that a tutorial covering nav meshes can work out at all? I really don’t hope so, as you would have to explain me in which community you have been then
Those who would be able to understand that tutorial if it was written on the adequate level for an advanced topic like this are also able to understand the articles and tutorials on the web which are written in pseudo code and alike, they don’t need anything focused on Unity as they can easily apply it to Unity. Don’t forget, the Mesh class in Unity is pretty much a direct mapping of how meshes are in the graphics API too with vertex and index arrays and the rest of the stuff you touch maps directly or near directly too, so its no rocket since to apply the knowledge to Unity.
It makes sense to make a tutorial on Behave and Aron Granbergs A* on how to use and apply correctly.
But it definitely makes no sense to make a Unity tutorial on NavMeshes, cause you require another half a dozen to a dozen tutorials to teach them the basics required to understand what you are talking about.
Also, your second block implies that you aren’t interested to learn the materia and tools required to utilize and apply it anyway, you want to learn the materia from the usage point of view (if it were someone else, I would have to conclude from that part, that you want a copy - paste tutorial but I know you are normally not a cheapsake from hell ;)), so going with AngryAnt Path or Aron Granbergs A* library and potentially looking what they do makes more sense.
Depending on your intend with it, Path might be favorable as its gpl available so you can reapply the knowledge and stuff at hand, even share your work again under GPL
That’s the navmesh pathfinder I wrote. It’s pretty shonky and you’ll have to generate your own navmesh .xml files (as mine are generated by a modo script I wrote)… but it’s a start.
Good, because I now need to learn it too and so far all I know is cubes called null points force players towards certains paths. Must be more to it that that.
I am also looking forward to any other sophisticated pathfinding solutions, hopefully all of them offering an option to try before buy. I found these links posted by jessy very interesting. Especially the pathfinding solution from rivaltheory seems an easy applicable all-in-one solution - if it is to come out at all. I don’t know for how long they have written “coming to Unity Store soon”, the link was created in July…
Jessy - I am with you on this, and I don’t understand the attitude you are getting, that there is no point in doing a tutorial on a new feature in Unity because most users are too dumb to use it. This is an arrogant response that is at odds with the usual Unity philosophy of making these tools available and useable by people on a variety of levels. There are more helpful ways to say “NavMesh will require some extra work on the users’ part to get a background that would help them put it to good use. That’s why there is at present no simple tutorial for the feature.” No need for geek swagger and insult. But I guess that’s to be expected in this forum.
We can only hope that someone at Unity with better communication skills will tackle this and outline the information that we need.
Here are my two cents. Unity is supposed to be easy to use and most of features are true. In my opinion, lately Unity is lack of good tutorials for new features. They have introduced new technologies each version, but I cannot utilize them to the fullness because they are no further documents how to use them after they have been released. I would like to see what are best ways to implement some of these features: Allegorithmic Substance, Lightmapping, Tree Creator, Cloth, and of course PathFinding.
