Which pathfinding asset is best for grid based 2D Top Down games like Prison Architect/Rimworld?

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1

Hi, I am currently using Unity 5 Personal Edition and I’m developing a game similar to Rimworld or Prison Architect. I’m doing this in Unity 3D with Y as up axis and orthographic camera. At the moment I am trying to decide which pathfinding system to buy.

What do I expect?:

  • should be updatable at runtime, because the world in my game is randomly generated, but this ain’t a problem as most pf systems have such an option
  • characters may only move horizontally, vertically and diagonally (8 ways), from one tile center to another like i.e. in Rimworld, where the tile under the character is marked as occupied

One asset that I know of, which can’t do the movement part is PolyNav.
The Pathfinding Project is way too complicated to set up the movement that way.

I’d really like to see some suggestions from people who are/were working on similar games. Which pathfinding system did you use? How difficult was it to set it up right?

Thanks!

2

hi;
Im in exact same position right now. Can you please share how did solve your pathfinding? And are you happy with it?

3

Hello!
Same as the previous post, I’m really interested in what you ended up using, as well as your experience testing existing assets.
Thank you! :slight_smile:

4

Hey!

I ended up following the “base building” tutorials from ‘quill18creates’ on youtube. Besides pathfinding it covers alot of other important things in terms of 2D top down games and the good thing is, Rimworld is his reference of choice, but of course he rolls his own design visually and code-wise. If you are interested in game programming and know at least the basics of C# coding, you should watch this series, if you haven’t already. :slight_smile:

5

I actually did watch the very nice tutos of quill18creates! (seems like everyone saw those)
I am currently setting up a new project, aiming to be a visual clone of RimWorld/Prison Architect (because I want to focus on the gameplay, not on the 3d models…)
I have more than just basics of C# coding (I’m working on Winform/WPF/WCF desktop applications for 6 years now) but I’m quite noob Unity wise :stuck_out_tongue:

Thank you for your reply! If you have anything to show about your game in progress, don’t hesitate to post a screenshot!

6

Hi there!

Would you be interested in Terrain Grid System (terrain based) or is it a standalone mesh grid like Grids 2D?

They don’t support pathfinding yet, but our World Map Strategy Kit does at World-Map level and we’re planning to include this feature in a future release of the grid assets. Would you be interested? And for what kind of grid (hexagonal or rectangular/boxed)?

Regards.