I like to code everything myself, but 3D character AI is just too much for one person to do well in a larger project with other elements. So I’ve been looking at AI Assets on the Asset Store.
I read posts from last year that indicated Emerald AI was integrating A*. It seems this is no longer the case. I reached out to the Emerald AI dev and this was his response to my question about A* integration:
I don’t have any info on this at the moment as I haven’t looked into it in quite some time. You basically would need to go through and replace all NavMesh related code with the A* Pathfinding equivalents.
The third party integration page is outdated. There are only two assets listed, one of which is AI and is depreciated.
I love A*, but for the first time in 8+ years of use I’m considering using Unity’s built-in pathfinding instead. I’d appreciate some advice/thoughts on AI integrations.
I just bought Emerald AI on sale, also hoping it would have A* integration. I’ve tested it a bit and would like to use it, but it indeed does not have integration.
However, I’ve looked through the code and it indeed seems that it would not be too terribly complicated to change the code. From what I’ve seen we would have to update the main script, but only that one. I don’t think there’s an easy way to do this externally, the script code needs to be changed. It doesn’t seem to be too complex.
I didn’t, but I also didn’t try beyond this one post. Like you did, I looked through the code more closely. I realized it wasn’t worth it to bother trying to integrate Emerald. It actually wasn’t about the lack of A* integration, so much as just how unsophisticated Emerald and almost all the other AI packages like it are.
Since that post I’ve done a year+ long deep dive into AI programming, have read ~30-40 research papers, watched every relevant lecture or talk I could find, read 3 and a half books on game AI (show me someone who can finish, plus a million articles and blog posts and such. And I’m so glad I did! It’s been one of my favorite years of hobby Unity development, and I really sharpened my not-unity-specific programming skills and learned a ton.
It all depends on your use case of course, so you may be perfectly happy with Emerald if you just want a few generic simple behaviors. But for me at least, doing it myself from scratch has been a blast. However, as a result I had to give up a lot of the focus I had previously on making natural looking code-driven animation control for AI agents.
Another option is something more in-between scratch and a “complete” package like Emerald. One thing I hated about Emerald was that it tried to do everything all at once, so wasn’t particularly good in any one area. It wanted you to use its systems for managing audio, events, etc that would have had a huge impact on my code architecture. I was however much more impressed with some of the Utility AI assets I looked at. RichAI was the best of them by a long shot, though I more treated it as something to learn from than an asset to use since I really hate node-based editors haha.
Hope this was useful to you, happy to chat game AI anytime! If you have any more questions you can DM me and I’ll send you my email. Good luck!
I use Behavior Designer most of the time because it gives me more freedom.
But Emerald AI seemed like a great pick for a specific purpose. And I just can’t focus on AI programming as well, because as a one-man indie dev there’s already too much to worry about.
