Creating varied paths

Beginner Questions
1

Hi all,
I posted on a thread that wasn’t answered, but somehow it got marked as answered.
Just to make sure we resolve this issue I’m recreating the thread.

Thank you!

Original topic question
"So I’m having two problems with my game using this API.
The first is the player constantly moves, and I want the enemies to constantly follow him. What I’ve been doing it just regenerating a path ever 100ms, but this creates jittery movement. And setting it closer to 1000ms creates odd paths with a quickly moving player, what’s the best way to handle this?

The second is I want the enemies to follow a non-optimal path in the interest of diversity. As show in this image.


The blue represents the player, black are walls, and red are the enemies and their paths. Local avoidance and AlternativePath don’t seem to really cut is as they just seems to offer a horde like AI.

Thanks in advance!"

Comment 1
"Bump.
I really need this as well.

I have eight enemies and even though I pipe in varied points for their destination the paths are more or less the same.

Especially since RVO is disabled right now > <"

2

I’d be interested in seeing what people are doing for this as well - I’m also just re-forecasting the path every nth number of seconds and am a little frustrated that every path to the main point is the same and just becomes a series of objects doing a conga line. I’d like to see them spread out and not necessarily take the shortest path as much as I’d like them to all take a slightly different path.

3

Alternative path with adjusted settings seems to provide me with a decent amount of variation.

Also, in response to the jittery movement, I had the same issue and solved it by only calculating a new path from a half way point along the current path. This means the first half of the path is left untouched and the second half is recalculated, allowing a smooth follow.