Are these 4 features possible with A*Star Pro?

1

I am creating a shooter similar to Half Life 1 with an emphasis on good AI. At the moment, I’m trying to hard code these features with mixed results. Here are the key features I plan to implement:

1.Pathfinding through standard terrain with slopes modeled as stairs. I will use A*Star for this. I would also like to be able to have the AI Jump if the mesh is a certain height to reach it’s destination but not required.

2.Seeking cover. AI can seek cover through calculations or nodes. I was wondering if A*Star is able to create these nodes or generate them? At the moment, I’ve been creating them manually which is fine.

3.Flanking the player. The simplest form would be using A*Star pathfinding and randomizing which path the AI will take rather than using the shortest all the time. The best form would be to have one path occupied so another AI won’t take the same path creating the illusion of flanking.

4.Randomized destinations for when AI is searching or patrolling. At the moment, I’m doing randominsidesphere to get a location around the transform then raycasting toward the location in case there’s a wall in the way. If there is a wall it will then choose the hit.point as the destination. I would like to know if A*Star would be able to do that for me.

Thanks in advance!

2

Yes, A* can do all of those, but bear in mind that they will take varying levels of work to implement them.

  1. Stairs work just fine in A*, just need to make sure that the graph is set up correctly. Jumping doesn’t come out of the box, but you have full control over the graph and can add special points with a custom movement script to accommodate it.
  2. Auto-generating cover nodes is not out of the box. You would need to add them yourself, or create a script that adds them for you.
  3. A* supports randomizing paths as well as existing paths can incur a penalty so subsequent paths are less likely to take the exact same route.
  4. Randomized destinations are definitely a thing. A* Pathfinding Project: Wandering AI Tutorial
3

Thanks, I’ve made some progress messing around with different graphs. It looks like jumping would need Links. Which graph type do you think would best fit an FPS game with simple stairs and some link nodes for jumping over stuff?

4

Hi. There are off mesh links supported. However, it is currently not possible out of the box to generate these automatically.

  1. There is nothing built-in for this.

  2. There is nothing built-in for this either I’m afraid.

  3. Take a look at the wander tutorial which shows various approaches you can take for this: Wandering AI Tutorial - A* Pathfinding Project