Prevent FollowerEntity from falling off ledges, hugging walls

Beginner Questions
1
  • A* version: 5.3.2
  • Unity version: 6000.0.23f1

Howdy,

We’ve just started using Astar Pathfinding Project as a drop-in replacement for Unity’s navmesh solution; we’re using a Recast graph in a 3D scene with FollowerEntity

Some questions:

  1. Local avoidance seems to drive characters out of the navmesh bounds, which makes them walk right off ledges to their death. Is there a way to prevent this from happening?
  2. “Desired Wall Distance” seems to have no effect, no matter what value is set. I found a thread from June 2024 where another user complains of something similar. Are there any special requirements for what the system considers a wall? In my tests, I use cube colliders that are on the same layer as the walkable surface. Also, does it matter that I’m creating the FollowerEntity at runtime and updating the distance value from the inspector while the simulation is running?
2

Yes! You’ll want to look into the useNavmeshAsObstacle property on the RVO Simulator.

Are your walls marked as obstacles? If you’re setting your obstacles through layers, I think you need your obstacles to be on it’s own layer marked as such for this setting to work.

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3

Thanks for the tip about RVOSimulator.useNavmeshAsObstacle, I missed it because I was so focused on the per-agent avoidance settings in FollowerEntity; it seems to work well and it highlighted an unrelated issue with our character controller (velocity mismatch when accelerating/decelerating) that is worsening the effect.

I’m going to try setting up an obstacle layer next, see if I can get that wall distance setting to work!

Thanks again.

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