I’m currently working on a warehouse simulation project in Unity where various resources—such as forklifts to navigate and perform tasks like picking and placing items.
A critical requirement for this simulation is the ability to run it at significantly high speeds—around 50x the normal time scale—for quicker scenario testing and performance analysis. However, when I increase Unity’s Time.timeScale to 50, the simulation becomes highly unreliable. The pathfinding behavior of the resources becomes erratic—they sometimes fail to follow valid paths, occasionally move through obstacles or racks, and sometimes end up in areas that aren’t walkable.
This undermines the purpose of the simulation, as accuracy in navigation is crucial for meaningful results.
I would greatly appreciate any insights or recommended approaches to reliably run the simulation at high speeds without compromising the integrity of the pathfinding logic. Specifically:
Are there best practices for using the A* Pathfinding Project at high time scales?
Is there a way to decouple simulation logic speed from Unity’s time scale to avoid physics and pathfinding issues?
Would manually controlling path updates or fixed delta times help in maintaining navigation accuracy?
Has anyone else encountered a similar issue when using this asset for high-speed simulations? If so, what solution or workaround did they find effective?
Any other configuration tips or architectural adjustments to handle this use case?
There’s some interesting discussion on a thread from before about time scales. The TLDR is I’d play with my graph density just to see how it behaves then.
What movement script are you using? I think this answer kinda changes depending on which one you’re using. For example if you’re using FollowerEntity, there’s a section on it here.
I’m just stumbling upon FollowerEnitity, I’ll take a look. I’m using AiPath along with AIDestinationSetter for pathfinding which is by default recommended in the getting started guide
Would you be able to show us where you see it’s recommending AIPath first? FollowerEntity is pretty much the “go-to” these days. The getting started guide currently is for that movement script (was changed maybe a month ago or two?) so if there’s any conflicting info, I want to pass that to the developer to take a look
Yes, FollowerEntity will work out of the box with this. However, it will of course be slower at 50x speed since it runs its simulation loop many times per frame.
The AILerp movement script will work at a high time scale without a performance penalty, but it is very limited in its movement and is not suitable for most games.
If this question was aimed at me, I’m using FollowerEntity (like I already mentioned )
It was at Sabhari, if you got notified on this thread somehow, sorry about that! Did not think that it would tag you since I only referenced the thread, so that’s interesting.
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