Using navMeshAgent.SetDestination() breaks navMeshAgent.destination()

[jessee03]

Having a weird issue. If I just use navMeshAgent.destination() everything works great. If I use navMeshAgent.SetDestination() and then try using navMeshAgent.destination() the agent will just stand in place. I’m using SetDestination() to randomly have my agent walk to a random navmesh position and navMeshAgent.destination() to follow a npc. I have tried resetting, setting vector3 to zero. Nothing seems to be working at the moment to fix the issue. Is there something im missing here?

[Kurt-Dekker]

Sounds like you have a bug. I’d start printing out the values that you think you’re sending to this navMesh

Keep in mind if you spam random destinations every frame, your navmesh guy ain’t gonna get very far in life.

You must find a way to get the information you need in order to reason about what the problem is.

What is often happening in these cases is one of the following:

• the code you think is executing is not actually executing at all
• the code is executing far EARLIER or LATER than you think
• the code is executing far LESS OFTEN than you think
• the code is executing far MORE OFTEN than you think
• the code is executing on another GameObject than you think it is
• you’re getting an error or warning and you haven’t noticed it in the console window

To help gain more insight into your problem, I recommend liberally sprinkling Debug.Log() statements through your code to display information in realtime.

Doing this should help you answer these types of questions:

• is this code even running? which parts are running? how often does it run? what order does it run in?
• what are the values of the variables involved? Are they initialized? Are the values reasonable?
• are you meeting ALL the requirements to receive callbacks such as triggers / colliders (review the documentation)

Knowing this information will help you reason about the behavior you are seeing.

You can also supply a second argument to Debug.Log() and when you click the message, it will highlight the object in scene, such as Debug.Log("Problem!",this);

If your problem would benefit from in-scene or in-game visualization, Debug.DrawRay() or Debug.DrawLine() can help you visualize things like rays (used in raycasting) or distances.

You can also call Debug.Break() to pause the Editor when certain interesting pieces of code run, and then study the scene manually, looking for all the parts, where they are, what scripts are on them, etc.

You can also call GameObject.CreatePrimitive() to emplace debug-marker-ish objects in the scene at runtime.

You could also just display various important quantities in UI Text elements to watch them change as you play the game.

If you are running a mobile device you can also view the console output. Google for how on your particular mobile target, such as this answer or iOS: How To - Capturing Device Logs on iOS or this answer for Android: How To - Capturing Device Logs on Android

Another useful approach is to temporarily strip out everything besides what is necessary to prove your issue. This can simplify and isolate compounding effects of other items in your scene or prefab.

Here’s an example of putting in a laser-focused Debug.Log() and how that can save you a TON of time wallowing around speculating what might be going wrong:

Coroutine missing hint and error

This is so unnecessary. Use the beauty and power of instantly and immediately putting a Debug.Log() statement into the very start of the coroutine, right at the top. Do this always at the very first sign of trouble or question in your mind. The instant you did this you would see “Oh man, this code is simply not getting run!” And you could LASER-FOCUS 100% your efforts on studying what you expect to run it, eg., the call location, and isolate why it is not running. You would look at literall…

[jessee03]

I think I found the issue. when I have 100 agents spawned there’s a delay with movement for all the agents ( takes about 15 seconds for the agent to go to the new location ). When I spawn just 2 agents they immediately will go to the new location. So it appears that unity is very slow with calculating the agents positions when there are so many of them. So my new question, is there a setting that’s limiting these ai calculations?

[Kurt-Dekker]

@jessee03

So my new question, is there a setting that’s limiting these ai calculations?

There may well be but I imagine you can look around the docs for NavMesh too. (There’s a lot of reading; pathfinding is a big subject!)

[jessee03]

@Kurt-Dekker

There may well be but I imagine you can look around the docs for NavMesh too. (There’s a lot of reading; pathfinding is a big subject!)

I think I was able to find a solution by removing rigidbodies, setting navmesh agent quality to low, and setting vsync setting to off. Seems to be calculating movements now for agents without any delays. Also just decided to use setDestination in both methods, not using just destination anymore.