Imagine a Game like Dwarf Fortress, with a 3D Grid, some “Blocks” are walkable, some not.
Does the new Unity 3.5 Pathfinding Framework provide tools for calculating these paths?
It looks to me like the whole navmesh approach might be complexity-overkill for a “simple” world like this…
Unity Pathfinding was designed for 2D/3D movement with float value positions (by which I mean X/Y/Z can equal 1, 2, 3, etc. and 1.5, 1.2, etc. (with decimals)).
In theory, yes you could get Unity Pathfinding to work with a grid based system but it would be a little complex. Unity Pathfinding is (for the most part) static. You cannot create or modify nav meshes on the fly, so if you have a 3D grid based game (like Dwarf Fortress), Unity Pathfinding would not work very well for you.
If you had static worlds, you could generate a path and find the nearest center of a ‘block’ for each path waypoint.
If you can, I would use something like A* Pathfinding. It is much more suited for grid based pathfinding systems.