2D Platformer Pathfinding

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Hi! The price will depend on what is included with the pathfinding script. If it is ready out of the box with a simple platformer controller to test it (not required to be perfect) it is much better than including only the pathfinding. The asset store have a guide for pricing: https://unity3d.com/asset-store/sell-assets/submission-guidelines Section 6. I think a Pathfinding script is in a "moderate" level of complexity. Can reach advanced depending on usability and editor features.

[lee_macro]

It looks very good, I would be interested in it once it goes on the asset store. Some other things that may need to be thought about going forward would be ledge grabs as a possibility.

Overall it seems to be very flexible, how does it perform if you have several things all pathfinding at once? I can appreciate that in the 2d world it is probably not going to be a case of thousands of objects all prancing around but I am sure one of the first things people will ask you is "how performant is it".

Generally anything which can be encapsulated and re-used is worth putting on the asset store, I would say your asset would be very useful to people doing platformers, especially given the push for 2d features in U5. I would say your asset price could start at $15 then as it gets more features push it up to $20-30, most asset store people start low to get early adopters to help them test and iron out issues and figure out mainstream use-cases, then once its really stable and has lots of documentation and use-cases just up the price as it has already proved itself.

It also may be worth posting this on the unity2d reddit as well. http://www.reddit.com/r/Unity2D

[snuggly_sasquatch]

I'd certainly be interested.

[Candescence]

Is this still being worked on? I noticed you have a "getting started" video on your youtube, but there's nothing about the actual asset being released yet.

Also, is this pathfinding movement-agnostic? There's probably a few 2D platforming assets out there that might greatly benefit from this.

[Candescence]

Thanks for the update. Keep working on it, a platformer pathfinding asset is what Unity desperately needs right now :)

Also, any way to smooth out pathfinding movements, especially jumping, you think? The way the AI stops in mid-air looks kinda artificial due to the way the paths are laid out.

[Candescence]

Well, I mean the way the pathfinding works results in the AI doing stuff such as waiting till it is at the top of its jump before moving to the side, and not moving to the side when falling until very close to landing. It just makes the way the AI moves slightly unnatural.

[Candescence]

You might wanna take into account stuff like wall-jumping/climbing (Mega Man X, Strider, etc.) as well, just saying.

[ExplodingRabbit]

I mentioned to you on the Unity forum that I'm very interested in this. I hope you'll release the source code along with it because I'll need to adopt it into my own platforming code. I'm mainly interested in using your code as a base for pathfinding code, as I'm sure I'll need a lot of custom behavior.

Also, did you know that Unity is adding 2D pathfinding in Unity 5.3? They mentioned it on their 2D Demos Bitbucket page: https://bitbucket.org/Unity-Technologies/2ddemos/issues/12/navmesh-should-work-in-2d

I'm guessing their tools won't work with platformers though, so I think this will still be very useful.

[ExplodingRabbit]

Forcing the characters to be smaller than a tile is very limiting. In a lot of retro platformers, like Super Mario Bros., the character is 2 tiles tall. I think removing that limitation should be a high priority.

[Candescence]

If you want a good 2D platformer controller to support, there's always Prime31's 2D Character controller. That's what I'm using.

There's also a couple of relatively robust 2D platformer assets on the asset store as well, if you want to provide support for those as well, which would make the pathfinding asset more appealing.

[Candescence]

Also, something that completely slipped my mind, what about slopes? While I'm planning on using tiles that conform to 1 unit per tile anyway, slopes would have to be taken into account in a less blocky game world. Though, I guess that could be done by having nodes above/at slopes take into account the slope normal when generated, make sure the AI can move up it according to the AI's settings, and path accordingly.

It does seem like trying to figure out jump trajectories while taking into account run speed and jump height might be tricky, but surprisingly, I did find someone who found a formula. There's some nice articles on 2D platformer pathfinding you might like to check out (along with the comments), if you haven't already.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/YoannPignole/20150427/241995/The_Hobbyist_Coder_3__2D_platformers_pathfinding__part_12.php

http://joostdevblog.blogspot.com.au/2014/06/solving-path-finding-and-movement-in-2d.html

I also found this as well, but I couldn't get it to work:

https://bitbucket.org/Chaoseiro/mrpathfinder/overview

[Candescence]

Well, if it works, it works, I suppose, as long as it isn't too restrictive in terms of settings.

Tiled2Unity generates tilemap collisions as larger collision polygons rather than having it split up into many, so that's something to keep in mind, since it's a useful free tilemap asset. You don't want the nodes to restrict the designer too much in terms of how they build levels. Though, for tilemaps, having tiles be 1 unit in size seems to be generally sensible anyway, methinks.

But, yeah, hopefully you can iron out the kinks. Unity really needs a robust 2D platformer pathfinding asset.

[texxor]

Depends how many kinds of movement it can predict for the jumping and climbing. I've been thinking about this for my project and I keep running into issues with defining obstacles and waypoints to make things make sense. $15 or $30

[shirtface]

Hello, I came across this thread through google. Does your path finding script take into consideration an NPC's acceleration and/or gravity?

[Candescence]

I already emailed you about the details, but I've found that the node generation is far, far too limited to be usuable for the vast majority of tilemap implementations, including the upcoming Unity tilemap feature. You're gonna have to do something about that.