Asynchronous Path-finding

Questions & Answers
1

Currently I use NavMesh.CalculatePath to find a path for an entity. The problem is that calling this function synchronously from Update causes the game to freeze temporarily when there are many entities finding their paths at once or when the paths are difficult to find.

I was thinking about moving the path-finding to a separate thread, but as far as I know Unity classes are not thread-safe. Therefore calling NavMesh.CalculatePath from another thread does not seem to be an option. Or is it possible to call it from a single thread, but not the main thread? I was thinking about a work queue for finding paths.

Are there any other options to find paths asynchronously?

2

NavMeshAgent.SetDestination already finds the path asynchronously, so there is no need to call NavMesh.CalcPath to navigate individual agents.

However it would still be nice if NavMesh.CalcPath could also be called asynchronously. Otherwise it is not safe to call it from the Update as it may cause framerate drops.