Trying to make enemy patrol paths

Unity Engine
,
1

I’m working on a semi-stealth fps and adding an enemy that patrols back and forth. I’m trying to figure out how to make empties for the end points of a path (using pathfinding) that can be parented to the enemy prefab and moved in the editor for easy plug’n’play functionality. thinking about this, I realized the points would move with the enemy during run time, rendering this completely useless. is there a way to make a child keep it’s global transform? I found this line of code

        child.transform.SetParent(newParent, false);

which sets it so the child keeps its transform, and that might work, but I don’t want to go to the hassle of figuring out how to make sure it always parents to the right enemy. is there a box I can check in the editor or a similar line of code but for preexisting parents, anything?

2

Im unsure what your trying to say, if you just want the enemies to patrol between points use, this
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/nav-AgentPatrol.html
If not, please try and explain it again

3

Let me suggest one modification:

make the paths be the paths (with their waypoints), and make the enemies use a path

So … scene structure like so:

EverythingElseInYourLevel
AllPaths
Path1
waypoint1
waypoint2
waypoint3
Path2
waypoint1
waypoint2
waypoint3```

Then tell the enemy which path to use, no parenting relationship.

In fact, that's how I did these handy waypoing gizmos... they even centrally report themselves to the Waypoint mangler!

https://gist.github.com/kurtdekker/c2246d3780b93fe4e023695eb947e85d

You can write other retriever functions in the waypoint manager if you need the paths grouped or obtained by other means such choosing one called "Path2" for instance.
4

OH, thanks Kurt. that would be a better way of doing it.

5

If each enemy has it’s own path and you wanted to make a prefab of that, another alternative would be to make an empty object and make the enemy and the path both children of that empty object- so that way the enemy and the path are both in the same prefab, but not parented to each other in any way.

Edit: By the way, it might sounds like I’m pointing out the obvious here, but for the longest time I had it stuck in my head that 1 prefab = 1 thing. For some reason it only recently occurred to me you could use a prefab to store a whole collection of things in different places and that it might be useful to do so in some situations. Maybe it’s just me.

1 Like
6

Yeah, I just thought of that right before I saw your post, thanks kdgalla.