My game project is a 3D racer where the player controls a ship, piloting through an asteroid field racing against other AI to the finish line. I’d like my AI to path around obstacles in 3 dimensions: left, right, up and down. There’s no actual terrain since the game takes place in space, but the race generally takes place within a few hundred units top to bottom. Can A* handle something like this?
Sorry, even though the system might be able to handle it in theory, it would be enormously resource intensive since a search graph for 3D space requires a LOT more memory (I have done it once before, but then I was limited to 707070 units because of memory constraints).
Having very fast moving agents (spaceships in your case) is also a problem.
Since asteroid fields are usually sparse, I suggest that you try some local avoidance heuristics (a force based system would probably work best).