How does Time.timeScale impact Unity's NavMeshAgent?

Questions & Answers
1

Hey folks…I have a game in build right now wherein I’m using Unity Pro’s navigation system. It’s an asynchronous turn-based game, so when you play your turn, part of that process is viewing your opponent’s previous turn.

Since most folks are an impatient lot, I wanted to give them the ability to “fast forward” the replay of their opponent’s turn. The replay is not in the form of a “video” per se. In order to make effective use of storage and bandwidth limitations, I’m mainly just capturing key events during the opponent’s turn and replaying those events on the current player’s system. But what I’m finding is that if I increase Time.timeScale to make the game go faster, my navigation mesh agents get all tangled up. The get stuck rounding corners, they lose track of their destination and just end up staying still, and sometimes they choose a different navigation path than they would have chosen when Time.timeScale was set to 1.0.

I don’t think there’s anything that I can do to regulate this or “fix it.” The higher I set the time scale, the worse it gets. I can somewhat comfortably fast forward to 1.25 times the original speed…but anything higher than that and the navigation becomes so far removed from the original data that it can’t be considered a replay at all.

Is there anything I should tweak in the navigation system when modifying the time scale?

2

Had the same Problem. Fixed it with workaround.

void Update()
{
	if (Time.timeScale > 1.0f)
	{
		CheckSteeringTargetPosition();
	}
}

protected float _distanceStearingTarget;

protected void CheckSteeringTargetPosition()
{
	float distanceST = Vector3.Distance(navMeshAgent.transform.position, navMeshAgent.steeringTarget);
	if (distanceST <= 15) //distance to next edge on nav mesh
	{			
		if (_distanceStearingTarget < distanceST)
		{
			navMeshAgent.transform.position = navMeshAgent.steeringTarget;
		}
		else
		{
			_distanceStearingTarget = distanceST;
		}
	}
}