Any way to access number of nearby avoidance neighbours, or otherwise if avoidance is occurring?

I'd like to know whether an agent has neighbours nearby, preferably by checking the number of neighbours, which must be getting set internally somewhere. Is this exposed anywhere?

Alternatively, how would I go about checking whether collision avoidance is currently having an affect on the agent's movement? If I could check the desired velocity before and after collision avoidance, I could use their difference to infer it, but desiredVelocity is documented as being set *after* collision avoidance.

Is it sufficient to check whether the vector to the steeringTarget is not colinear with the desiredVelocity? I suspect this will fail because of non-instant acceleration.

 

The only indication you can get at the moment is to look at the angle between the desiredVelocity and the vector towards the steering target - and yes the would not always be useful - e.g. if one vector is zero, or the setup is symmetric (avoiding left/right in equal amounts).

Can you tell more about the use case, knowing the avoidance ?

 

Ok, I'll give that a go for now.

The use case is that I have a simulation, currently using another navmesh library, and RVO for avoidance, which I want to replace with Unity navigation for various reasons. The simulation can get very crowded (corridors with agents moving both ways), so to avoid deadlocks I temporarily disable avoidance for agents detected to be stuck against other agents, to allow them to 'ghost' through problem areas. The 'is stuck avoiding' calculation is simply 'stopped for a while' and 'has avoidance neighbours'. I can't replace that last part yet. This is something easily accessible in DetourCrowd.

For now I'll do the best I can with the steering target, which might end up being enough since I have a fair timeout on the 'is stopped' calculation - thanks.

 

Actually, while I have your attention - are you looking after navigation in Unity nowadays? I take it Mikko left Unity last year so I can't request things from him I have a few other small feature requests, how would I go about making those?

I'm a maintainer on Recast/Detour, and have worked in AI for a long time, so don't worry, they'll only be sensible and feasible requests