General Raycasting Question

Unity Engine
1

How expensive is raycasting? I’m designing AI for fast-moving objects, and the environment is going to get chaotically dynamic (lots of obstacles to be avoided moving around everywhere). I want to have it predict the best next move frequently, but, to do it, it’ll have to do raycasts from all potential future positions. Since movement is 3-dimensional, this amounts to a lot of raycasts.

I know I can constrain them a bit by not having the raycast go beyond a certain range and by limiting how far ahead it needs to predict, but it’ll stil be alot of raycasts? How much overhead is that gonna be, generally speaking?

2

Still looking for an answer to this one.

3

Um, it’s been 4 hours… this forum is active, but maybe give it a little more time :wink:

Perhaps you could clarify how many “a lot” actually is.

4

Not sure exactly. I high estimate would be 50 raycasts per frame. I do mean per frame and not per think cycle. I’ve already factored that in. I can’t imagine it’s going to be that expensive, but I need someone more in the know about ray casting to confirm it.