- A* version: 5.4.6
- Unity version: 6000.3.12f1
Hi! I am trying to set the acceleration rate for a FollowerEntity, to be specific, the rate at which it goes from not moving to reaching speed.
From what I can tell this no longer gets a distinct value with FollowerEntity (I think some of the older pathing scripts did?), and seems to be controlled by slowdownTime. The code suggests this, and in practice when I increase slowdownTime it does also decrease the acceleration when going from 0 to speed.
I just want to make sure this understanding is correct and I’m not missing something. It’s not very intuitive that this value controls both of these fairly distinct characteristics of movement, so I wonder if I am just mistaken
If my understanding is correct I’d like to request a separate value for acceleration, or at least renaming this property to something more representative of it’s broader purpose.
Thanks! Love this plugin (and ALINE) btw!
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If you’re having a specific need that FollowerEntity doesn’t cover I think this is where you’d either want to take a look at writing your own movement script or simply brute-forcing acceleration by changing maxSpeed or something. Maybe I’m misguided here but the built-in movement scripts are more of a generalized starter than a one-size-fits-all with robust options for every game. A* Pathfinding Project is built to be extensible in this way.
Unless you need the performance properties of FollowerEntity or something else I also think it’s a good solution to simply use AIPath also!
I can appreciate what you’re saying but this really feels more like a standard and generalizable feature that’s reasonable to expect from the movement scripts rather than something that people should be tasked with handling specially. At best it’s pretty confusing that a property called “slowdownTime” controls all manner of acceleration.
AIPath and RichAI both have dedicated Acceleration properties so I’m inclined to think Aron saw it was something general enough for the core movement scripts. The first line of the FollowerEntity states “This script is a replacement for the AIPath and RichAI scripts.” but this feature is missing as far as I can tell.
It really feels like an oversight that this level of control was lost in the move to FollowerEntity and can’t imagine that slowdownTime should handle both the actual slowdownTime and the entities acceleration. If nothing else that property should be renamed in my opinion.
Thanks for your time
It’s a valid suggestion and I’ll recategorize it as such. Could help people specifically migrating from AIPath/RichAI to onboard a bit easier if nothing else. Thanks for the feedback!