Navmesh - Path Finding

I am at a point in development in my project where I am starting to work on pathfinding AI. This is new territory for me and want to make sure I start on the right path.

Let me preface by saying I am useing the Free version of Unity.

I have been reserching diffrent approaches to this. With Untiy's recent Navmesh functionality that was added, my thoughts are to use that functionality although with the free version I fear I will run into issue with moving obstical avoidance. From what I can tell, that is more a Pro feature.

So my question is, should I be heading down the standard navmesh functionality or should I focus more on a package from the asset store for my needs instead?

A* pathfinding of course seems to be the most popular approach from my research thus far. I have checked out the package on the asset store called "Advanced Fantasy AI Pack 2.0" which I find a very robust "drag and drop" solution. I of course would still need to write custom scripts to implement that system into my project so I want to make sure I am heading down the right road from the start. The majority of my Unity scripting experience has been with Java Script so far. I understand that C# is a "better" language to use, but haven't taken the plung into learning that yet. Finally getting comfortable with Java and would rather stay with that at this point.

Any suggestions?

 

Frankly, I'm using Pro right now, and Unity's avoidance is poor at best. The only somewhat acceptable result I got was while using the feature that obstacle cut the navmesh, but then the performance just killed it. 6ms per cut? No thanks. On top, those obstacle are only capsule-shaped.

In the end, we bought the A* Pathfinding Project Pro, which is 100$, and just about a thousand times better than anything Unity offer. Now, A* is still far from perfect, but for our needs, it does the job.