Hey everyone 
This is actually my third rewrite of a navigation plugin I’ve been working on. My first attempt worked decently. The performance was good, but the paths were not the best quality. I have been doing a lot of research online in the fields of AI and pathfinding, and I’ve learned a lot. My third (and final) rewrite is working perfectly. It’s very fast, and it’s very simple to use. I will be releasing it on the Asset Store soon (for free). And I will update it as I add new features and make changes. I’m open to ideas on features I should add. Or if anyone wants to learn about how pathfinding works, I’d be glad to share my knowledge
Demo Video
Screenshots
Features
- Fast And Easy NavMesh Import
Model a mesh in your favorite modeling program, and with the click of a button, import it into Unity to use as a NavMesh.
- Easy, Accurate Pathfinding
Give your agent a destination, and it will find the path on its own. No hard work needed.
- Move The Agent How YOU Want
Your agent can be a RigidBody, a plain GameObject, a CharacterController, or whatever you want. The agent supplies a steering vector, and the agent’s movement is completely controlled by YOU.
- Multithreaded Pathfinding
Pathfinding is very fast and can handle hundreds of agents at a time without putting a dent in your framerate.
- Uniform Random Point Sampling
You can easily sample a random point on the NavMesh. Useful for making characters wander around, or even for spawning characters and objects.
Upcoming Features
- Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance
Add an obstacle component to an agent, or any GameObject, and the agents will move around them, and not run into obstacles.
- NavMesh Baking
Build your scene in Unity, and build a NavMesh within Unity with the click of a button.
- NavMesh Editing
Bake the NavMesh in Unity, and use a built-in editing tool to change the mesh to your liking.
Possible Upcoming Features
- Off Mesh Links
Add an Off Mesh Link to a spot on the NavMesh to connect it to another spot on the NavMesh. Useful for jumping across gaps, ladders, elevators, etc.
- NavMesh Streaming
Dynamically stream in new parts of a NavMesh. Useful for large, or open world levels.
goodwork. is it based on recast?
Thanks you. And no, it’s all my own work. I learned everything through online research. While I have looked at some of recast/detour’s source code, I haven’t based any of my work off of it. I was mainly looking at how his baking process works. When I include baking, it will be mostly be based off of recast because I like the way he does it. It’s very fast.
This very nice, but I’ll wait a while before using it, just to let it mature. 
Are you using the A* algorithm?
You sir, are a brilliant person. I’m going to be all over this if it doesn’t require pro.
Thanks guys and no, it doesn’t require pro. And yes, it uses A* to find a path between triangles, then uses the funnel algorithm to optimize and simplify the path
I just wanted to say this looks great, and you can’t beat the price
My only real question is will it work on mobile?
I really like the simplicity of it, just getting a move vector to me makes a lot more sense than some of the other path finding solutions I’ve tried. I will be keeping an eye on this and giving it a try once you’ve released it. I’m especially interested in the avoidance because I’m not happy with the way this is working in my game yet.
One thing I didn’t see in the video was a setting to change the turn radius, is it possible to change?
ok, 1 more question, what happens when the target is outside the nav mesh? Will the path just fail, or will the agent walk to the edge of the navmesh and stop?
This is looking great, and to release it for free is very generous of you.
Its funny that you asked if it would work on mobile. Yes, I’m actually making this for a 3rd person shooter game for Android that I’m working on My first attempt worked great on mobile. I could have 50 rigged and scripted characters all running around the level with no framerate loss. And this rewrite is much faster, so I should be able to squeeze even more out of it. And I haven’t even started optimizing yet 
Right now, I don’t have a turn radius. The steering vector that the agent supplies is just a normalized vector that points in the direction it should move. Turning speed can be added if you dampen the change in the steering vector. I’ve thought about adding acceleration and turning speed variables to the agent. I can add those if you guys think it would be useful.
And when the target is outside the NavMesh, it finds a path to the edge. The algorithm finds which triangle the start and end points are in. If they are not in a triangle, it simply finds the closest one. So it would be easy for me to add a check to determine if the point is not on the NavMesh.
I added two new functions to the NavMesh to help with checking if a point is on the NavMesh.
bool NavMesh.isOnNavMesh(Vector3 point)
returns true if the point is on the NavMesh, and false if it is not. Note: It will return true if the point is floating above or below the NavMesh within a threshold. This threshold varies based on the density of the triangles (because of the octree that is used to pick nearby triangles).
Vector3 NavMesh.samplePoint(Vector3 point)
returns the closest point on the NavMesh to the given point.
That’s great that it works on mobile, I’m presently working on a Iphone RPG which I would love to test your solution out on.
Adding some sort of acceleration and turning radius might be useful to some, especially for vehicles, as long as it can be turned off. Personally I like your solution because of it’s simplicity, and that sort of thing could be added into the movement code away from the plugin. I’m sure others would want it though.
Yeah I’ll add all that stuff, and have an option to select simple or advanced movement for the agent.
I got rid of my maximum timestep system, which used coroutines, and I added multithreading support instead. Pathfinding is faster now, and still won’t make the game lag. I tested with 500 agents constantly pathfinding around my test scene. FPS stays at a solid 130. By the way, this is on my laptop which has 64 bit AMD A6-3400M 1.4GHz quad core with 4 Gigs of RAM.
I have a game which has a constantly changing maze (walls are being added/changing). Will the AI for this automatically adjust when the predetermined path becomes obstructed by such walls and obstacles? or will it just stop and break?
Thanks
If your maze is constantly changing, that means the NavMesh will have to change also. The vertices and triangles of the NavMesh are public, so you’re able to change them. I also plan on adding a delegate for when the NavMesh changes, so the agents recalculate their paths. But manually setting the triangles and vertices for this sort of scenario would be difficult. When I add baking, I will try to make it as fast as possible, and threaded so it can run in the background. If it’s fast enough, you’ll be able to bake the NavMesh in-game whenever the world changes, making navigation in a dynamic world very simple.
When will we see this in asset store? has it been tested at all? if not let me try 
I would love to see how many characters I can run on my droid razr without lag.
I was planning on putting it on the Asset Store after I finished obstacle avoidance, but I can put it up tonight if you’d like. I’ve tested it with 500 agents on my laptop, which ran just fine. But I would like to know how well it runs on single core devices.
Waiting for news !!!
Greate job, keep work !
This looks great man! How are you planning on doing the dynamic obstacle avoidance? Modifying the navmesh, by raycasts, some other way? I wanted to use the pro-version of Unity’s pathfinding but their dynamic obstacle avoidance seems to just be steering behaviors and I need a path ahead of time for what I’m working on. Do you know if that will be possible? Anyway great work, I’m looking forward to this!