OK, I've developed a navigation system and ...

Behavior & Navigation Navigation
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OK, I’ve developed a navigation system and I am thinking of open sourcing it to get people to use it and hopefully improve it.

Why did I develop another nav system, well I found that the default system and even other systems online were good but not great at large crowds or in my case hordes of zombies. I had seen World War Z and wanted to do a game in Unity that would allow thousands of zombies to move and attack the player.

So I did what I recommend other people to do prototype a simple setting in Unity and try the solutions you have available. Unity’s navmesh (this was a while ago Unity 4.x) did not perform so well and I had purchased and used the rather good A*Pathfinding solutions which was better with large Unit counts but nowhere near the level I wanted.

So I looked around and found a potential pathfinding solution that could be massively better for large crowds, and I implemented it and it worked.

My game evolved changed and got sidelined then I thought should I improve and release my navigation system on the Asset store?

It’s not at the level where I could in all honesty push it onto the Asset Store (for sale) as it would need someone with coding skills to use it.

But what if I the ‘complainer’ on the Unity forums released it under an open source license so we as a community could use it and improve it?

PS it also works in 2D (with a few code changes).

Video of Zombie Horde Test 02

1 run PC standalone (with Fraps running), Quality setting Fastest
3,645- None
3,626 - Unity’s
3,065 - A*
6,384 - Arowx’s

Video of Zombie Horde Test 01

Hmm, well things did not go as well as I had hoped (see the video in the first post).

Running on my PC the scores were:
1918 - None :face_with_spiral_eyes:
1882 - Unity’s :eyes:
1909 - A* :hushed:
1755 - Arowx’s :sweat_smile::frowning:

I think it might have been FRAPS as on a run without it I got these results.
5237 - None :face_with_spiral_eyes:
3311 - Unity’s :wink:
3308 - A* :face_with_spiral_eyes:
3581 - Arowx’s :smile::stuck_out_tongue:

But look at how well my solution does a better Zombie horde, it’s not just the quantity look at the quality! :wink:

Zombie Quality comparison:
None - Well they don’t even crowd.
Unity’s - Not much better really.
A*'s - Much too organised and deadly for a Zombie Horde.
Arowx’s - Yay dumb crowding Zombies and nice and slow.

Uploaded Video 0733 so it only took about 12 hours give or take a couple of hours for food/drink/breaks.

4 Likes
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Which algorithm?

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How about a demonstration of some kind?

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How about a demonstration of some kind?

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And/or some stats. We don’t actually know anything about it yet.

When you say “large crowds” what are you talking about? Dozens of agents? Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands? On what hardware?

Dynamic or static nav data? How is the nav data generated?

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There’s no vote option for “who cares since you show us nothing”

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Yea demo/stats please. No offense, but the OP’s technical knowledge/ability in prior threads doesn’t inspire confidence. This could alter that impression (and hopefully not reinforce it)

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Definetely release it for free. You’d be surprised how much value having other people read your code will bring.

And if it turns out to be a hit, simply release a pro version with a couple more features.

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You should sell it on the asset store so the UnitZ clones will have better navigation.

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The zombies in UnitZ have no built in navigation. It’s just straight walk towards the player and jump every few seconds.

Despite this the zombies perform pretty poorly. Pulling out all of the zombie character controllers and replacing them with nav mesh agents actually improves performance.

That’s not a trivial piece of work. UnitZ has a pretty messy code base. Adding in any substantial improvements isn’t easy. Which is possibly why no one ever does.

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I wonder if jim sterling knows how to read code. It’d probably be pretty eye opening if he read the source and realized that, sure… it’s a jumping off point, but it’s a mess.

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OK, I’ll put together a test on my PC that compares my nav system, A*Pathfindings and Unity’s in Unity 5.2 and then video it for you. Also last time I tested it was using 4.x so maybe my nav system is not needed.

Expect hordes of red capsules chasing yellow capsules and green capsules shooting the red horde.

It may take a bit of time on my marks go… 17:11 BST off for a quick coffee!

I’ll be back.

1 Like
13

use robot kyle :smile:

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Release it for free and I have a feeling it won’t be as good. Definitely hand out a demonstration… free webplayer demo or mini-package.

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Confirmation that @Ryiah and @Meltdown are controlled by one person.

8 Likes
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Hmm, well things did not go as well as I had hoped (see the video in the first post).

Running on my PC the scores were:
1918 - None :face_with_spiral_eyes:
1882 - Unity’s :eyes:
1909 - A* :hushed:
1755 - Arowx’s :sweat_smile::frowning:

I think it might have been FRAPS as on a run without it I got these results.
5237 - None :face_with_spiral_eyes:
3311 - Unity’s :wink:
3308 - A* :face_with_spiral_eyes:
3581 - Arowx’s :smile::stuck_out_tongue:

But look at how well my solution does a better Zombie horde, it’s not just the quantity look at the quality! :wink:

Zombie Quality comparison:
None - Well they don’t even crowd.
Unity’s - Not much better really.
A*'s - Much too organised and deadly for a Zombie Horde.
Arowx’s - Yay dumb crowding Zombies and nice and slow.

Uploaded Video 0733 so it only took about 12 hours give or take a couple of hours for food/drink/breaks.

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Heh! I agree with you on the quality. An organized zombie horde is an unwanted (and frankly, disturbing) result. :wink:

2 Likes
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Can I recommend you take a look at Mikko Memomonen’s Recast and Detour libraries? They’re open source, written in C++ and the Detour library has crowd pathfinding. It might give you some inspiration. I’m using it to write a bot for CS 1.6 and it works well.

Libraries at:

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Might work for a hive mind, but in most cases zombies are disorganized and falling apart so yea. Good work @Arowx .

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Very cool. I sincerely hope you will opensource it on some liberal license like MIT or BSD.

Does this check on that?