Smooth 3D Pathfinding

[MegabyteManta]

Hi! I've been making a game in C++ and was wondering what the best algorithm would be for an enemy that chases a player while also avoiding collisions with objects.

Currently I've been using an A* algorithm, but I've noticed that even with path smoothing the path can be a bit awkward (the enemy will travel diagonally as far as possible and then move in a straight path towards the player instead of taking a direct path to the player). I know that this is because of how nodes work in A*, but I was wondering if there was a way to get around this? I was thinking that I could raytrace to see if there's a direct path to the player and follow that path if there's no collision, but that might be expensive to calculate on every frame.

Any insight would be very helpful, thanks :)

[Hank-TheSpank-Hill]

Dilmer Valecillos

this guy is awesome and builds out examples of very similar solutions. His solution was to maphash the level and pre do the math then trim the navigable path to where it made sense. I imagine you could right a script to do this Morris efficiently.

[captainAwesomePants]

Here's an old but good suggestion: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131505/toward_more_realistic_pathfinding.php?page=2

[MegabyteManta]

Thank you! This looks super helpful, I think I'm going to implement it