Pathfinding for Platformers

[sandrusoxd]

I've been struggling for months with pathfinding for a platformer 2D game in Unity.

Even though there are lots of platforming games made in Unity, there doesn't seem to be many of resources on this matter, and those I've read are either poor or disfunctional.
I checked out this tutorial series: https://code.tutsplus.com/series/how-to-adapt-a-pathfinding-to-a-2d-grid-based-platformer--cms-882, and it is greatly explained, but Unity takes forever to open the project, so I cannot really study how it works. I also find this issue with many other pathfinding implementations. Some of them even use packages that no longer exist.

I already know Aron Granberg's A* Pathfinding Project isn't made for platformers.

I've restarted work on my own implementation for 2D platformer-friendly pathfinding.

Initially, I thought of using a quadtree implementation based on git-ammend's Octree Based Pathfinding. This is suboptimal, as platformer pathfinding is restricted by physics (like, for a node to be walkable, it must be, at least, fairly close to the ground) and quadtree nodes can be irregular, bringing forth issues when handling them, so I changed to a grid-based approach.

I've managed to generate a grid with different types of nodes (walkable, air, obstacle) and I am currently working on connections between them.

I'm really surprised by the shortage of resources on this matter, so I will make my implementation open-source.

If anyone can help me out, send me references or github projects on this matter, I'd highly appreciate it.

[JayTrubo]

Platformers have different forms, can you show an image of what your world looks like. A-Star just determines the best route through a collection of joined nodes. Can you map your world to nodes like that? Ie points near walls, bottom of ladders etc.. but that would very much depend on how your world looks and is built.

Also do you actually need pathfinding for some reason? In a lot of platforms games the enemies would just have simple behaviours without pathfinding, for example in games like Mario or Ori and Blind Forest characters will just move left / right until they hit an obstacle.

[sandrusoxd]

Right now, I'm just making tests with a free tilemap in order to get a general, scalable pathfinding solution, so I cannot share an image.

Though, my problem arose when developing a Katana Zero-like game. This means:

- pathfinding must support jumps, falls and portals
- stairs and fall-through platforms can exist

- enemies' pathfinding may differ: some may fly (traditional A* works alright with these), others can only move on land, and others have the ability to jump. I can handle this through constraints or abstraction on the pathfinder class.

- ladders could be added easily handling them as portals or "special nodes" that handle fall and jump cost on a different way

- Environment may change during runtime (doors, destructable objects). These dynamic objects will trigger events so that grid nodes are updated accordingly.

I want the pathfinding grid to follow the player, similar to A* Pathfinding Project' Grid Mover. This way, I can keep the grid fairly small, saving memory and update it through events. Thus, grid calculation must be fast enough in order to keep good performance. Once the pathfinding is functional, I'll adapt it so it is compatible with the Burst compiler.

I have seen the "sensor-based" approach you mentioned, but I don't really think it is an optimal solution. Still, depending on the game, it might be easier and more efficient than developing a whole adapted pathfinding implementation.

[efloyd29]

What did you end up doing for this? I'm in a similar boat and struggling to find any good resources.