Polarith AI (Free/Pro) | Movement, Pathfinding, Steering

Spherical 3D sensors are already done. We are currently polishing related behaviours, demo scenes, etc. This 3D sensor stuff was much more work than we ever thought. Besides that, we also moved our office and acquired a new big project. All things came together at once so that our beloved 3D patch needed to wait. We'll release a video on YouTube regarding all these topics soon.


Martin from Polarith

 

Thanks Martin

Currently I have Apex Path which is nice and solid, but further development has ceased and it does not support full 3d environments. Also the steering there is a separate component which is an additional cost.

What I like about what I have seen about Polarith so far is that it seems to be possible to use it in a variety of different situations/genres (racing, space, 3rd person etc.), and while not exactly a Global Pathfinding solution it can integrate with Unity Navmesh (or others) to get access to this, particularly in 3D.

The docs and tutorials look solid - great job so far, and I look forward to a video of the new release.

Am I right in thinking that the Pro version enables some editing of behaviours such as Waypoints and Patrols?

Also I notice in the video there is a state machine which is showing in the Animator video that seems to visualise the behaviour of the Agent. Could you explain how this works and how such behaviours can be constructed? i.e. is it visual or is it through code?


I notice the asset is on sale at the moment and I'd be happy to take a punt on it if it has a future and it will be supported

cheers

Nalin

 

Absolutely correct.

Thank you, we put our heart and soul in it.

Yap, you've got it right. In Pro, you can create custom patrols/pathing behaviours with both visual in-scene tools and scripting with our API.

This is pretty much standard Unity Mecanim. There are a lot of tutorials for Unity's inbuilt state machine although it is often used for animating things, but it can be used as a robust AI state machine as well. This is what we did in the video. Our asset store packages contain example scenes including these state machines. The usual workflow is a mixture of visual editing and scripting.

And we would be happy to welcome you to the Polarith family. We are thankful for every new customer which motivates us to develop our products any further. Our plans are to form an extra team just for developing/supporting Polarith AI alongside our new individual projects. In the future and besides the already mentioned feature updates, we'll plan to build a little ecosystem around Polarith AI. We plan for other plugins as, for instance, an excellent formation add-on.


Martin from Polarith

 

Thanks Martin

I just bought Polarith and look forward to working with it and seeing the new release - good luck with this.


cheers

Nalin

 

I just bought it too, hope more features add to this cool Asset.

 

How to use environment Updater?

 

Thank you for supporting our development.


Martin from Polarith

 

Thank you so much!


Martin from Polarith

 

What exactly do you mean by environment updater? As long as the environment is not marked as static, it automatically updates.


Martin from Polarith

 

Hi Martin,

Any news about including basic racing scene showcasing Polarith, as mentioned in your post :-

https://forum.unity.com/threads/pol...thfinding-steering.466846/page-4#post-3372214

Thanks

 

Hey,

unfortunately, we decided that it is too time-consuming to deploy them for all Unity versions supported by Polarith AI since Unity made breaking changes here. If you already own a Pro copy, my team might send you the un-optimized version used in the videos.


Martin from Polarith

 

Kindly check your pm.

 

@Polarith which versions of Unity do you plan to support going forwards?

 

BTW I wrote a small Unity component to combine Final IK and Apex Path a couple of years ago as shown in the video below, meaning that the little spider bot orientates itself around the environment so that when climbing up ramps, it exhibits proper contact with the physics surfaces.

I'm guessing/hoping that with Polarith it ought to be pretty straightforward? Use Unity Navmesh to provide waypoints (or draw them in the editor), and then write a small steering component that drives the FinalIK character.

Not sure if you have a forthcoming demo that exhibits anything like this?

 

Franz had send you the racing scene via mail.


Martin from Polarith

 

We're trying to support 5.3 up to the latest. Maybe, when 2019 comes out, we think about dropping older versions step by step.


Martin from Polarith

 

With our components, you can easily access all required information for archieving what you want. Please, have a look at the corresponding docs. A demo which combines our technology with FinalIK does not exist yet.


Martin from Polarith

 

Any ETA on the 1.7 release? Looking for custom shape navmesh support.

 

It's already on my desk, which means that I'm the bottleneck now because I'm the guy merging all the stuff into the main branch. Unfortunately, my workforce is currently bound to another big project for one or two weeks. After that, I will begin to prepare the release. I can't wait either.


Martin Kirst from Polarith

 

(Pro customer here)

It would be great to get any resources you have on racing applications. I have really been struggling to get Polarith to work well in that application. Much appreciated!

 

I've send you a PM concerning your requested resources.


Martin Kirst from Polarith

 

I'm really interested in this product, but I'm a playmaker user. Is there any plans on supporting Playmaker/do Playmaker actions?
Thanks!

 

Can I use Polarith AI for school of fish (swimming) / bird flocks (flying) in 3D space (not using navmesh)?

 

Unfortunately, that is currently not on our short-term agenda.


Martin Kirst from Polarith

 

With version 1.7, this will be possible to an unmatched degree within the whole industry, but with the current version 1.6, it is not.

We have worked on 3D context steering for 3 to 4 month now. Unfortunately, I am the bottleneck at the moment because I am the final gatekeeper of the project for merging, but my workforce is currently bound to another great project financing our company.

Very soon, times get more relaxed for me so that I can catch up with the development of my team so that Polarith AI gets the heart, soul, and attention it deserves again.


Martin Kirst from Polarith

 

That's sad. Only ICE Creature Control seem to do that easily but it is not compatible with Unity 2018.1 and was abandoned. The popular Emerald AI can also only do Navmesh but there is a plan as well to support swimming/flying in future version. To my knowledge, that means nothing is covering that market in the Asset Store right now: one AI system to rule them all. Well, thanks for the info and all the best to you and your team!

 

This has stalled our team's production for the a solid 4 months now. Can anyone recommend an alternative solution for NavMesh pathing?

 

Having your production depend on future features is generally risky, this applies to features planned by big companies like Unity and smaller asset store developers alike. Disregarding that, how is 3D context steering related to NavMesh pathfinding?

 

Thank you for your wishes. My team appreciates that very much.


Martin Kirst from Polarith

 

It saddens me very much that you're being delayed. Sorry about that! Polarith AI is my affair of the heart. So I'd like to invest even more time in it, but the survival of the company must be my top priority as CEO, and that does not always fit with my plans for Polarith AI and requires a reasonable amount of synchronization.


Nevertheless, @christoph_r is right:

NavMesh pathfinding have already been in a production state before v1.6.


Martin Kirst from Polarith

 

Back in Business



Oh hey! Once again, we apologize for our absence, but there is a ton of things we need to take care of at the moment. We are in the middle of a huge project that requires our undivided attention and on top of that: We moved into our new office space for the past couple of months! Also, we have prepared our social media sites to show you all the goods.


Please, enjoy the following video. Although that was very unlikely, none of us nut jobs got hurt during filming.

Martin Kirst from Polarith

 

Hi,

Just wanted to say I like the package a lot, just started the free version and very likely to get pro soon. I had a question about the simple controller 2d though. My game is sprite based and requires the enemies and players not to rotate on the z axis for the sprite animations to work properly. I tried looking for the simple controller 2d script to just edit out the add torque method but cannot find it. Is there a way around this so it just moves their position and not the rotation?

Also, I cannot get the gizmos to show up on the scene and game screens. I’ve got all the check boxes checked but maybe there’s something in preferences I’m missing?

I’m also using playmaker and Odin packages to help with serialization and flow. I don’t know if that helps at all.

Anyways, thanks for making such a great package and your input would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Oliver

 

Hey @guildmaster2017, you should build your own controller. You can retrieve all the information you probably need out of the AIMContext component like DecidedDirection or DecidedValues. For a rough overview have a closer look at the source code we deploy with the packages.

Your problem with the gizmos sound strange. Are you sure that you enabled the gizmos within the gizmo tab in the component itself as well as within Unity? What Unity version are you using?


Martin Kirst from Polarith

 

Has anyone been able to make Nodecanvas actions for Polarith AI?

 

I ended up using the source code and making my own, thanks a lot. Works really well now. And after a couple of reboots the gizmos appeared so it all works now. I’m working on version 2017.3.3, perhaps something happened on the back end when I imported it into the existing project.

 

Hey guys i am getting a framerate drop and i am trying to solve it so i was hoping you guys could help

I have the following scene:



There are in total 35 units (agents) in this scene each of the agents have the following setup:




Then i have my AIM Performance:


And ofcourse a SteeringPeceiver:

Now running this scene i get the following results (from my profiler):




Which is about 30 FPS.

Can you tell me if ive done something wrong? or something i can improve on?

 

Not sure if you guys already looked into ECS, but this may be an interesting starting point?

 

Fantastic asset, just got the pro version and been playing around with it and it seems like it has a lot of features.
Quick question, is there any integration with behaviour designer or similar tools, or general tutorials for working with state machines? The inbuilt context decision making looks great (am I right in saying its a kind of utility AI?), however I didn't design my AI with that in mind so its making integration with my project a little difficult. Cheers!

 

Glad to hear that.


Martin Kirst from Polarith

 

Hey, there! Your issue looks really strange, because we would expect the peformance drop not within the Perceiver but in behaviour components. So we cannot understand that on the basis of your screenshots either. To solve this, we need to know your concrete SteeringPerceiver setup and all the corresponding surroundings.

Maybe we can have a VoIP meeting to solve your issues.


Martin Kirst from Polarith

 

One of my developers is currently looking into that topic. It seems that it would require a little more work to integrate with ECS, but we will try to migrate.


Martin Kirst from Polarith

 

Thank you for supporting our further development!

You are partly right. The contextual decision-making works more than utility-designed AI than classical steering (which is, in fact, a linear combination of steering vectors). Pure utility AI is based on the principles of fuzzy logic as against our approach utilizes multi-criteria optimization (MCO). These MCO approaches (i.e., the epsilon-constraint method we are using) can also give you excellent solutions lying in concave problem shapes (AI environment sampled as objective functions by our sensor), as against the maximum weighting method (which is often used in common utility AI) leaves out concave solutions entirely because it can only search through convex problem shapes.

That's why contextual approaches decide more like humans would concerning the latest behavioural research.


Martin Kirst from Polarith

 

Hello Martin thank you for your response i would love to have a chat with you to show you the issue please contact me on info@anappgames.com

 

Thank you very much for the detailed explanation. Are there any resources or tutorials available for state machines or behaviour tree's though, such as behaviour designer?
If not, is there any way I can do something similar. I saw in one of your video tutorials you could make an agent move to somewhere whilst avoiding an obstacle in the way. However my agents have a few different states they need to transition into depending on a few variables (mainly distance, but a few others as well). For example, I want my agent to start off by patrolling, and then when within a set distance attack the player. However if the player is close enough and the agent isnt attacking, I want it to flee. This is fairly straight-forward with a state machine, however Im struggling to find out how it would work in Polarith.

 

I managed to fix my FSM issue, however I've come across another much greater issue that you might be able to advise with. It would seem that behaviours such as Avoid (using this within a 2d context) don't actually avoid an objects bounds, just its centre. I tested this by going onto the Avoid lab2d and scaling the danger object on the y axis to form a wall. It ignores this new system and acts the same as it did before, meaning it avoids the centre but cuts right through the object.
Obviously one fix for this is navmesh, however that gets a lot more tricky and limits me to just seek and flee (without writing my own behaviours). I hope this is just something I configured wrong, and not a flaw with the steering behaviours object detection.

 

Tried out the demo and liked what it has to offer. Is future integration with the A* pathfinding asset something that's potentially planned?

 

I'm happy that Franz managed to solve your issue.


Martin Kirst from Polarith

 

Sorry for the delay. I've been on vacation recently. First of all, I'm glad that you managed to integrate with an FSM. The example packages come with demo FSMs using Unity's Mecanim, especially the vehicle scenes.

Regarding your issue with the Avoid radius: you can use AIMPlanarAvoidBounds, AIMPlanarSeekBounds or you can regulate the perceived radius per object directly within an attached AIMSteeringTag.


Martin Kirst from Polarith

 

We already did a rough test implementation, and @AnAppGames also implemented this on their own. If you are a Pro customer, we can send you a very experimental version of an A* integration.


Martin Kirst from Polarith

 

Any news on the next release?