Prioritizing paths

Beginner Questions
1

I’m currently developing an action game and have been using your pro version happily for a little while. However problems occur when many agents request paths at the same time. As I understand it whenever I use StartPath it queues the path and calls back when that path has reached the front of the queue and has finished being processed. However when the player sets a new destination for their character i need to be able to set that particular path to go to the head of the queue, as processing that path is much more important than processing the paths of all the npcs. Currently I have around 30 or 40 npcs and if the player requests a path it can take anywhere from 0.5 - 3 seconds before the path reaches the head of the queue, is processed and sent back, allowing the player avatar to move. I looked through your documentation but couldn’t really see a way to prioritize paths ( or even as a last resort, clear the queue of paths so i can reassign them). Am i approaching this incorrectly? Have I missed something?

Any advice would be much appreciated :smiley:

2

Hi

This is not possible at the moment… What you can try to do is to block until the path is calculated using AstarPath.WaitForPath http://arongranberg.com/astar/docs/class_astar_path.php#a36de576afe962e470d4379d8c02c2673
This could however end up as lag.

Maybe something hackish could be done to the LocklessStack class (hm… isn’t that a queue… maybe I should revisit that class) to put a specific path at the start instead of at the end. http://arongranberg.com/astar/docs/class_pathfinding_1_1_util_1_1_lock_free_stack.php