Apex Path v2.0 [RELEASED] - High Performance, Easy to use dynamic Pathfinding

Can your system handle fully destructible, procedural 'planetary' (point gravity) terrain for a FPS ? My terrains will be roughly spherical with a radius of about 250. I couldn't find much information about the dynamic pathfinding/changing geometry capabilities of your engine.

 

With Apex Path, can I implement my own movement system, such as rolling a rigidbody, and make it work with Apex Path?

Edit: And while I'm here, I may as well ask: Does Apex Path work well with stairs? I would guess so, but I haven't seen anything about it...

Thanks

 

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I tried implementing your scenario, with a grid filling the entire 4000 x 4000 terrain. And even without baking it resulted in an out of memory exception. This is no real surprise since the initialization will do 1.6 billion ray casts for the height map.

Now we could add an option to disable the grid's own height map and simply use the terrain only, but then any additional level geometry in the scene would not be covered.

However the question is, do you really need the entire terrain to be active for navigation at all times. Will you have AI characters moving from one extreme opposite to the other, or will the action be focused in an area around your player characters?

If the latter is the case, you can create multiple 100 x 100 grids for instance and then only enable the grids where the action is currently playing out. We have a video showing this dynamic initialization.
Of course laying out 1600 100 x 100 grids is a pain but you could create a small script to take care of that.

If the proposed subdivision strategy does not match your needs, then I am afraid we cannot support your scenario, at least not at this time.

 

We do support destructible worlds, and we are currently in the process of releasing a number of tutorial and example videos.We haven't yet produced the tutorial on this feature but the example video should be live soon.

Spherical terrain on the other hand is a problem.
Wrapping a uniformly sized grid around a sphere is basically impossible.
Another problem is that with point gravity 'up' is not well defined, it is some arbitrary vector, and consequently the ground plane is too.
So I am afraid we do not currently support that.

 

The short answer is yes two both.

There are two ways in which you can control movement.
One is to define and control speed settings, doing this allows to control how fast a unit is moving and can also be used to control the animations of a unit.
The second is the actual movement of the unit, commonly referred to as locomotion.
You can easily implement your own locomotion, and we have an example on how to do this included in the package.

With regards to stairs, you can define a maximum height that a unit can step onto, which will override any slope limitations. So yes even though the slope of individual steps on a set of stairs is vertical units can still navigate up and down stairs.
You can of course also avoid the steps of stairs by placing a collider as the slope of the stairs.

 

Do you have any plans to support xy-plane? This would be super useful for gravity-based sidescrollers.

 

Great, thank you, I am picking up Apex Path soon!

Edit: I have it! I will implement it soon!

 

Bummer alright. I don't think this will work for me then. Good side is that I've almost finished my own, so I may not need one after all.

 

It is something that we have been debating, but currently it is not on the road map.
This may change if enough people request it, but due to the nature of Vector3's switching things around to use another plane isn't as trivial as it might seem.

 

I already own the A* Pathfinding Pro Project, and the only complaints I have against that asset is that the startup times for dynamic maps is very very slow, and the garbage collector runs constantly and causes brief aggravating freezes in gameplay (on mobile).

Does you asset offer any benefits comparatively speaking? In other words, does it not make any sense to own both assets. Thank you!

 

Hi,

I was looking into your product. Amazing so far.

I'm developing a TD game (www.warfrontdefenders.com). Using Unity Free Navmesh. It's cool, but I'm facing problem of agent local avoidance. Since my game requires some agents to stop and fire, the agents on the same path behind him must avoid the standing agent. So, far my agents are getting stuck whenever there's a crowd forming.

Can your pathfinding solution help me on this. Particularly avoidance. I tried A*, but didn't have a nice experience with it either. The RVO code doesn't work nicely when there's walls and corners.

 

Dynamics is one of the strengths of a grid based solution like ours. Of course the time it takes to initialize a grid depends on the size of it.

We allocate as little memory at runtime as possible to avoid GC, so I can assure you that the GC will not run constantly, far from it.

So seeing as you are having issues with your current solution, then I would say it makes perfect sense for you to pick up one that better meets your needs.

If you have further questions on this, please let us know.

 

Our latest update includes basic local avoidance. It does contain a bug currently, but that will be fixed in the next update in a couple of days.
The basic avoidance is only unit avoidance however.
More advanced avoidance will be part of the Apex Steer package to be released some time in the reasonably near future.

We will not be using RVO, as you mention it has some problems, especially with regards to dynamically changing geometry.

 

Hi there. I'm interested in how Attributes are used with your system. On your website I read this:

If you expect that your game will require more than 31 attributes to control conditional interaction between entities (at least for pathfinding purposes), you will have to find other means.
However since attributes can be combined to form a mask, you can easily create far more than 31 conditions, so unless you have some very complex pathfinding scenarios this limitation will not be a concern.

So this means a character could have two Attributes and a door could be restricted to characters possessing those two attributes?

 

Yup that is correct.
We have a video showing some of the usages of attributes on our tutorials page, or directly on youtube.

 

I bought this asset yesterday and I am really liking it a lot.
What would really make this great is PlayMaker actions and more Mecanim examples.
With Playmaker actions we could really be able to wizz through our Path Finding requirements without any coding.

 

Yes you are not the first to suggest Playmaker integration, so it is something we will look into in the very near future.
Also we will produce a video showing how to interact with Mecanim, however I cannot give a specific date for when this video will be ready.

 

I have a question... Is there special setup I need to do so that Unity3D doesn't give me errors?
Just when I try to build, I get an error "
Assets/Apex Path/Apex/Scripts/QuickStarts/MenuExtentions.cs(4,11): error CS0246: The type or namespace name `UnityEditor' could not be found. Are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?
" , is there some way I need to set it up?
I am not even using Apex Path in the build scene yet, because I am just going through the tutorials.
And I tried "Reimport" on it, it still didn't work.

I am sorry if I missed something obvious.

EDIT: If I didn't miss anything, it might be my PC, it causes odd mistakes similar to this sometimes, I will get back to you after reboot.

EDIT AGAIN: Reboot didn't work , it still might be my PC, but I am looking for other things also, it DOES build if I remove the whole Apex folder, so it's not like it won't let be build at all :/

Thank you.

 

No it is not your pc, what you are experiencing is a bug in version 1.1, where an editor script was placed in the wrong folder.

I did mention it in an earlier post, by I realize that not all have seen this.
Luckily you can easily fix it:

1. Locate the file Apex\Scripts\QuickStarts\MenuExtentions.cs
2. Move the file to Apex\Editor

We will release the patch for 1.1 that fixes this and another bug today, so depending on how long Unity needs o process the package it should be live in 1 - 3 days or so.

 

Whats the differences between this pathfinder and Unity's built-in pathfinder ?

 

Apart from the features directly related to path finding, for which you can find a comparison chart here, there are a number of additional features, such as Attributes, Load Balancing, Messaging and more.

The link above explains those too and you can find videos on most features on the tutorials and examples pages.

 

Oh! I thought I saw something, but I missed it when I looked over again, and I thought it was for a previous version XD.

Thank you very much!

 

-I keep geting:
The referenced script on this Behaviour is missing!
and
Ignoring asset refresh of ProjectSettings/DynamicsManager.asset because the file isn't in the Assets directory!

on every demo scene from the examples?

 

Hi,

I'm playing with apexPath at the moment...
it's cool so far...!

but the following code gives me a NullPointerException for the cell on my mobile while on pc it works well...

<
GameObject gw = GameObject.Find("GameWorld");
GridComponent gc = gw.GetComponent<GridComponent>();
IGrid grid = gc.grid;

randomPos = GetRandomPosition();
Cell cell = grid.GetNearestWalkableCell(randomPos, randomPos, false, 10, 0);
<

GetRandomPosition() gives me a random position on the groundPlane...
and I have no clue what an Attribute mask is... couldn't find info about it... but "0" worked on pc...
(ah, I'm using this to spawn agents at random positions on the groundplane... and since the grid already knows where the walls are placed I thought I could just get a walkable cell from the grid);

any idea why this would work on pc but not on mobile...?

thanks!


PS:
oh... and just found out that moveTo also doesnt work on mobile... ... do I have to enable something for mobile...?

 

Did you follow the instructions in the 'Examples and Tutorials Project Setup.txt' when setting up the examples project?

If so what Unity version are you on?

 

With this package would it be possible to have units be able jump on dynamic objects? For example lets say there is a book shelf that characters normally would walk around, but for whatever reason it falls. Since the height of the bookshelf is then only like a foot, compared to 6 feet they should be able to step on it to get past an obstacle. Is that possible with this. Sorry if that is something that is easily found in one of your tutorials or docs, I just started looking into the project.

 

Are you saying that GetNearestWalkableCell returns null on the mobile but not on the pc?
My immediate guess is that your GetRandomPosition() is not confined to only return positions on the grid, and if randomPos in your example is not on the grid, it will return null.
So probably it returned a valid pos on the pc but not on the mobile.

While not related to the problem, the recommended way to get the grid is as follows:

Code (CSharp):

1. randomPos = GetRandomPosition();
2. IGrid grid = GridManager.GetGrid(randomPos);
3. Cell cell = grid.GetNearestWalkableCell(randomPos, randomPos, false, 10, 0);
4.  

Besides being shorter it achieves two things.
It won't break if you add more grids to the scene.
It will return null if the position is not on a grid.

With regards to Attributes (and by extension AttributeMasks) they are covered in the documentation, both the user manual and the extensibility guide and by two videos in the tutorial section of our web site.

Finally MoveTo on the mobile. When you say it doesn't work does that mean it throws an exception or does it simply do nothing? Could it be that you feed it a destination using the same randomizer as above that gives it a position not on the grid?.

 

Yes we do support dynamically changing geometry. The book shelf would not be marked as an obstacle but rather as terrain. It would then be inaccessible when up right, but once toppled over it would be walkable.
This is not an automatic thing however, you need to tell the grid to update its height settings for the affected area, which is a simple matter of calling a method (Update(Bounds extent)) on the grid.

As an alternative you could also let it start out as a static obstacle and once toppled over change it to terrain (change its layer), and then call the grid update. Come to think about it, the latter is probably the better of the two when looking at general grid performance.

 

So I purchased Apex today for this purpose. My game has a bunch of mobs that follow a path and may need to stop. I don't want my mobs to bunch up which has been my problem with SWS. I got excited watching the videos and thought APEX would be perfect for me. So far this does not seem to be the case. I created a scene ... put a block in the middle and allow my mobs to walk towards the other side. They still do not seem to avoid each other any more than the physics engine provides. So then I applied Dynamic Obstacle script which I saw on another example. The problem I am finding is instead of trying to follow the path, the mob's just try to avoid themselves as they draw blocked areas on the floor.

Very disappointing. Is there any advice you can give?

In the end, all players and mobs will need to be mobile obstacles so that we don't walk on top of each other.

http://www.twitch.tv/flymario/b/555975277

Above is a link to this issue. Maybe its simple to fix

 

Units should not be dynamic obstacles.

What you have to do to enable basic local avoidance, is to apply that to the units. The easiest way to do so is using the quick start, Apex -> QuickStarts -> Steering: Basic Avoidance.

 

Oh my this is absolutely perfect! Brilliant!

Thanks for your assistance Geminior!

 

This tool looks great. We just purchased it since we've been having a lot of issues with other pathfinding API's in the asset store. Hopefully this one will do the trick.

Although my main reason for purchasing it is related to large maps and multiple grids, I have a question regarding control over unit movement:

All of our units are animation driven using root motion. What we have been doing with other tools was simply getting the path nodes and then using our own implemented steering behaviors to get a "desired velocity" for the agent. Then we simply send the desired values to the animator and it sends the unit in said direction based on some damping values as well.

Is there a way to do this with Apex? Is it possible to only use your interface to calculate a path and return it as an array of positions?

Even better, would it be possible to use your steering behavior interface, but NOT actually drive the agent with it? That is, can we maybe just get a desired velocity from the agent and drive the unit ourselves using that vector?

If so, please point me in the right direction in the documentation. So far, I'm finding that most of the documentation is geared towards users who do not wish to code in your interface. I'm hoping for more example that show how to access the agent data via scripting so that we can drive units in our own way.

Thanks in advance for any help!

 

I just purchased Apex Path. I have 1 question about the the covered cells for Dynamic Obstacle.

In my game I have a diagonal object in the game world. your script create a big rectangle (red covered cells) around the object instead of cells covered by the object. Is it possible to just create covered cells for cells covered by the object.

First image shows how it works now, 2nd shows how it should work.

Thanks for your help

 

Yes you can do both of the things you mention.
To use your own steering you simply need to implement the INeedPath interface and issue a path request

Code (CSharp):

1. var req = new BasicPathRequest()
2. {
3.     from = from,
4.     to = to,
5.     requester = this
6. };
7.  
8. GameServices.pathService.QueueRequest(req);

Once the request completes it will call back through the INeedPath interface with the result, part of which is the path.

The second option is use the built in steering but override locomotion, i.e. how the unit is moved.
To do this you simply implement the interface IMoveUnits on a MonoBehaviour and attach that to your unit. This allows you to pass on the movement vector to the animation.
The examples project has a simply example of this locomotion override, although its not related to using the animations to move; CharacterControllerMover.

The topics of manually issuing path request and overriding locomotion are on the list for the next batch of video tutorials, all of which you can find here.

We are also planning to release a video specifically showing how to interact with Mecanim.

 

Wow, that was a really fast reply!

I'm going to delve into this tomorrow and see how it turns out. I'll let you know if I have any other questions. Thank you!

 

It is not currently possible to do that no.
While it may seem like a simple thing at first glance, it actually is not. A dynamic obstacle can be any shape or form, so to calculate its actual bounds, as opposed to the axis aligned bounding rectangle, is no trivial matter.

Since dynamic obstacles are updated frequently the cost of the update must be kept low, and we have yet to find a solution that achieves this.

 

I'm not seeing the "CharacterControllerMover" example that you mentioned. In the documentation it says that it can be found in "Apex Examples/Extensibility" But there is no extensibility folder inside my examples folder after unzipping it. Can it be found somewhere else?

 

Apex Path 1.1 patch 1 RELEASED

Changelog

v. 1.1 patch 1
New Features:
- Option to disallow diagonal movement added to the SteerForPath Component.
- IControlFacingOrientation now has an Unsubscribe method.

Bug fixes:
- MenuExtensions had escaped the editor folder, they are now back in the fold.
- The basic avoidance steering will no longer affect units with no velocity.

 

The folder is Apex Examples\Scripts\Extensibility. I will make sure the documentation is corrected, thanks.

 

Hello once again!

Thank you for all the help so far. I now have my custom unit controller implementing the IMoveUnits and ITurnUnits interfaces, allowing for root motion driven movement via mecanim. It's working very well at the moment!

However, I can't seem to track down the ability to tweak unit speeds. Granted, I get the desired heading and the desired speed from the Turn function, but I can't seem to find where a max/min turn speed can be set.

The IDefineSpeed interface is where I expected to see it, but I only found variables for movement speed, not turn speed.

I also noticed the FacingOrientation class, but I can't quite make out exactly how it is defining a speed, it seems like it's completely driven by the steering algorithms.

Is there somewhere where I can set the desired maximum and minimum turn speeds of a unit?

 

Well the turn speed logic is different from the move speed logic, in that it is left up to those that request a certain facing direction to also control at which speed the turn is made.

By default there is only one component that requests the unit to turn, the Steerable Unit Component. It has a Turn Speed property that can be set to whatever you want.

You can however also choose to implement IProvideFacingOrientation and override the facing orientation of the unit to do whatever you want instead of just facing the direction of movement.

There is an example class FixationPoint in the Apex Examples\Scripts\Misc folder (in the examples project).

But as you stated you expected to find the default turn speed on the IDefineSpeed interface, which I can see makes sense, so we will probably make that change in an update, even if it is a breaking change.

 

No problem, I'll just use the direction only and override it with my own unit turning behaviors, that shouldn't be an issue.

I do have a few important questions about the idea of "stitching" together multiple grids:

I've seen the multi-grid example but since it wasn't a tutorial, it didn't show me much in the way of how to go about it. I started by setting up a scene with multiple grids near each other. I'm using the SteerForPathComponent and for testing, I'm using the Selectable default behavior for setting new nav points.

When I give the unit a destination on a different grid than the one he's on, I see that the generated path ends at the edge of the first grid. Then, only when he reaches the last node on the first grid, the unit starts to travel in a general direction towards the destination (without pathing), finally, when he is actually on the next grid, only then does he generate another actually grid path to the destination.

There are a few things about this that I'm concerned about. First, in the example video, when the unit leaves the first grid, it actually generates a new path all the way to, and including the second grid's path to the destination. In my test scene, he only repaths on the second grid once he reaches it.

Second, the behavior of the unit when he leaves the first grid is completely intermittent. That is, sometimes he just crosses the gap with no problems. Other times, he re paths back to the first grid for some reason and does that endlessly (leaving the first grid and then coming back to it over and over), and even sometimes, when he leaves the first grid, the unit just travels off in some random destination no where near where I asked it to go and never stops, running into walls and other obstacles.

So, onto the actual questions...

1) Is it possible to generate a path request that gives me one single set of waypoints across multiple grids? This would be the most ideal scenario for our game.

2) If the first option is not possible, then how can I go about getting my unit to include the second grid in his path the moment he leaves the first grid (Like the example video). Am I just missing a simple component to make it do that? (Note: Even if I repath onInterval he still doesn't attempt to path when he's not actually on a grid.).

Again, the first option would be the absolute best case scenario, and I don't mind writing custom code to make it work, I'd just like to be pointed in the right direction if possible.

Thanks again for all the help! And I'll do my best not to bug you all too much once it's up and running.

 

1) Yes using portals this would be possible, i.e. define each side of each grid as a portal to the next. You would need to create a null action that does nothing, which should make the unit just walk the distance between the portals.
However beware that one of the reasons to use multiple grids is to reduce the time needed to find a path, if using portals path finding will take longer as it will process the entire path in one go.

2) I believe you have misinterpreted what you see in the example video.
Explaining the details of off-grid navigation is too complex to do here, but in simplified form what happens when you tell a unit to move to a destination which is on another grid is:
The unit will move to the closest possible 'exit' on the first grid, it will then move to the first cell outside, then move to the closest 'entry' on the other grid and finally path to the destination.
These are all separate navigations, so the unit never has the full path from A to B when moving between grids with no portal connection.

I can see that we should probably make a video to explain multi grid navigation in more detail.
I suggest you contact us by email support(at)apexgametools.com, so we discuss these issues in a little more detail.

 

Apex Game Tools Forum
We have added a forum to our website, in the forum you can get support for Apex Path and all our coming products!
You can find it at http://apexgametools.com/forums/

There is also an announcement forum where we will announce updates, product releases etc. you can subscribe to any of the forums and automatically get our updates.

We will of course continue to support this thread.

We would like to hear from you!
We always want to improve our products and provide you with the best service and support possible.
If you are using Apex Path in your game, we would really like to hear from you.

We have setup a form at http://apexgametools.com/contact/

We like to hear about your experience, challenges, achievements, feature request etc.

 

yes, exactly it doesn't work on mobile...
I set the position manually at the moment to make sure it's a valid position... but still I get null with GetNearestWalkableCell on mobile device...

and here the same... it works on pc but not on mobile... using the same position on pc as on moible... :-/
but I do not see any error message in the log here...

(mobile means Android for now)

 

I will have to get back to you on that.

 

Thank you!

I was able to get it mostly functional using portals. I will contact you via your support email with further questions as to not clutter this forum up.

 

1 ) we can see benchmark on mobile please Multi-threaded working on it ?
2) and road map
3 )versus rain Comparaison
4) what's you call AI integration any jump or animation system integration

 

1) We do not have benchmarks for mobile, as one device differs from another. Watch the performance video and use that as a base line.

2) Upcoming products, this is of course not a static list.

3) You will find our feature list here. In addition we have a number of videos showing the functionality available.
We will not be making explicit comparisons with other products, the credibility tends to be low.

4) I do not understand your question.