What about If I were to buy a license to use RVO Myself. The chances I’ll sell more than 100,000 are nil and 500 is resionalble to me. Would you be able to just reactive its implementation for me?
I just bought the project from the Asset Store a couple of days ago and just recoginized that the local avoidance is not working. There wasn’t a note on the Asset Store that this is not working… 
So what to do now? I got my A* package - which I love - but my units should not move through each other… and to be honest I do not want to buy a second path finding project in order to get things done.
Aron, do you have at least some kind of solution or idea to implement such a thing by our own?
@Bluemoon
Sure, if you email them and you get a license, I can make a custom version which includes the RVO system. No problem.
@roberthahn
Sorry for the confusion. I have answered your review in the Asset Store
You can try to use other free force based systems such as UnitySteer. They are usually not as good as rvo local avoidance, but they can work pretty well. If you are thinking about coding something yourself, here is a good reference: http://www.red3d.com/cwr/steer/
PS: Sorry for the late answer, I have been away for a while and haven’t been able to answer many forum posts.
Hi Aron, ok seems like it’s a tough one. Just bought it, and yea bit of a shock it’s been pulled. you need to update the shop and website, it is not obvious at all…
- taken today on Asset Store.
- from http://arongranberg.com/astar/docs/local-avoidance.php
I really hope you manage to convince them but it seems unlikely. Blender has implemented Detour it as far as I’m aware (and I’m sure you are too 
, maybe there’s a way… I know it’s probably Python, but maybe those guys are able to help bring it to the little guy! Maybe just compile to DLL? Or Boo since it’s a ‘Python inspired syntax’ …I’m no programmer but do believe in magic 
bit out of my league and it’s probably showing cheers
Ah, right. I used screenshots on the Asset Store. I missed that local avoidance was included in those.
[Updated docs]
Just purchased A* Pathfinding Project and read this. I’m a little disappointed as avoidance was one of the main reasons for the purchase. Do you have any idea if you will implement even a basic avoidance system into the pro version in the future?
I just sent a email asking them to redo their licenses to the 2 UNC emails listed. It’s rather aggravating for independent citizens to be excluded from technological access to technology they helped to fund plus even one of my cousins attended that school and made straight As.
With such policies as UNCs big business is enabled to create all the war and zombie games they wish based on deep pockets not technological merit or aptitude and without regards to sociological impacts…
…meanwhile a very simple game that could one day turn out to be an excellent teaching and research tool that I was hoping to slowly build up using A* and Behaviour Trees has been thrown a major road block because I don’t have deep pockets.
What really is bad is you can bet the both the licensors and licensees of this RVO technology were granted their deep pockets (indirectly) by the US tax payers. This is what one calls abuse of ‘Commander’s Intent’ when one studies the US Constitution and the reason a folk found a country to begin with.
Yes, I have a bachelor’s degree and yes, I attended some grad school and would have liked to have been given a cush TA or RA job at University rather than working minimum wage jobs as a busboy and a janitor and not being able to study for University while doing those jobs. Yes, I earned $15 per donation of plasma 5 times per semester while walking 6 miles round trip to do it. Yes, I was left with $14,000 in student loans despite working minimum wage jobs and being frugal.
Yes, I spent 3 months after graduating with a Bachelor’s in Computer Science and Mathematics looking for a job in my ‘degreed expertise’ and finally getting such a job. Yes, I was even offered a job out of the blue as a ranch hand in south Texas despite being pale and skinny before I got a professional job. So you see my time at University really can’t be painted as being deprived and suffering because I was giving up all the ‘riches’ of private enterprise. Hah! Which political party started that propaganda? So, yes, attending University was actually enjoyable.
So, yes, working in private enterprise doesn’t make me Bill Gates nor is it likely that any of the multitudes working minimum wage jobs will give up their chance to be Bill Gates by depriving themselves to attend University. They might even do enough work with their RA and TA stipends to found a company like Google which really isn’t about smarts as much as making information publically available.
Yes, I call the University Agricultural extension and get free advice on growing the fruit and vegetables I can’t afford at the grocery stores and that advise is actually much more liable to earn me something to eat than using UNC’s RVO algorithm whether UNC makes the algorithm free or charges $500 per published application. Public research is the university’s charter.
Who are we kidding here? UNC is profiteering off the mobile smart device and game developer ‘gold rush mentality’ John Sutter style and effectively eliminating the chance that RVO’s use could be one day used to help model ecological behaviors in games written as learning tools for education and other applications. Far be it from me or anyone else to want something educational from a game rather than the typical war and zombie fodder their new licensing policies effectively fosters by making such technology only affordable to big business with access to the Federal Reserve or other national banks.
The university charter was meant to enable self-sufficiency of people like Mr Granberg, despite the fact than we all know that as individuals Mr Granberg or any of us aren’t going to be funding streets, hospitals, medical IR&D, parks, or big business except through the comparatively minor contributions of our taxes and responsible use. To put licensing fees on university research such as RVO, this isn’t atomic fusion or fission you know, is a slap in the face to the general public and an unfair competitive advantage to big business and government.
I really, really hope that you wrote most of the above in the aforementioned email you sent to them.
I’m sad to think that the RVO algorithm now basically is dead.
Oh, yes very similar, but before any rumours start I AM not the Church Lady and I didn’t walk 20 miles to school, there and back, up the hill, both ways in the snow everyday.
+++++
I removed this earlier critique, too much repeating of same thing. I needed to rewrite from the fallacy of the policy to charge for RVO for peaceful use while making free for military use to raise money for the University of North Carolina. The charter of UNC says that University should not engage in behaviors that wrongly impedes the liberty of a citizen as making RVO free to foreign military use would.
If raising money for students is the goal, they would do better asking for ‘Donate’ via a PayPal button from individuals then depending on charging a licence fee to use RVO that only big corporation and big governments can afford anyway. The budget shortfall was caused by government.
The mostly likely non-commercial RVO use is in trying to obtain military advantage in accident free blitzkrieg and that usage is given greenlight to use RVO for free with current license.
The most helpful commercial use of RVO most of us as citizens would appreciate would be that cars and trucks on highways were outfitted with sensors to avoid collisions using RVO technology but under RVO license terms companies must pay to use RVO software for that purpose. With cell phone technologies, vehicles could even report that a vehicle was driving erratically and dangerously to traffic safety enforcement as that behavior isn’t always about speed.
An ideal for a private citizen studying privately to learn bird behaviour and wanting to model birds gathering into flocks and migrating from the Arctic to the southern hemisphere to use in a learning game would need to pay for an RVO license.
I thought about removing all of this but it is ridiculous to charge for a RVO license fee for individuals and corporations using it for peaceful purposes while allowing foreign military to use RVO free for warlike purposes. That’s my opinion.
+++++
US is funding DoD at the expense of education and public service. The DoD funded RVO at UNC. US cuts reduces funding of DoD and education. Result: requesting license money from the general public for software funded by the US Department of Defense to make up for these funding cuts to a university. Overreliance of the DoD and supplier industries was warned against by Eisenhower.
Very bizarrely the DoD funded this SW for military applications and yet for competing militaries in foreign countries the University of North Carolina has seen fit to give free access to those foreign military institutions as a military is a non-profit organization. However those that would simply like to make a game or learning application for a living and aren’t even likely to recoup costs of buying an RVO license must pay $500 per application to use the license. So we as tax payers funding the DoD funding of the military research to begin with and then we are asked to further the funding of the RVO software so that it can be improved at our expense but still free for military usage regardless of country or potential for destructive use of the RVO software. One would think the DoD and UNC planned this in order to ask for increased funding from Congress due to those darn foreign militaries’ penchant for managing to stay so current with state of the art research coming out of US universities.
And meanwhile, college basketball and football players are trying to unionize for professional pay at universities yet most of them aren’t doing the coursework or could do the coursework to stay qualified for their degrees. The colleges make so much darn money off athletics who cares if they aren’t qualified to attend or criminals. Witness the current college basketball scandal at the University of North Carolina.
I would like to make clear I do not represent the University of North Carolina. I did not cheat to earn my bachelor’s degree or did admit unqualified citizens to play sports to earn millions from them while selflessly patting myself on the back for giving them the opportunity to earn a degree.
I wonder why ETH Zurich doesn’t have these problems?
University of North Carolina - Lux Libertas
Let’s hope UNC is not wasting money on these frivolous types of trademark registrations and lawsuits:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/blog/east_carolina_university_tomor.php
12:00 AM: Tomorrow Starts Here
…or did the electricity fail on that clock?
ECU - Serve
Sorry, but asking the general public to fund software via software licensing fees for a second time around after already being funded by them via taxes the first time around via the DoD all the while making the very same software freely available to competing militaries is a fail.
I think UNC has lost their compass.
I should also amend that those directly involved in the decision to license the RVO are only trying to help the innocent students affected by the DoD, US government’s and UNC massive diversion of resources towards military spending and college athletics rather then education and public good. Even though it is aggravating it must be much more so to them. It’s like being required to put a quarter in a UNC gumball machine every time you visit campus to feed the pauper students because the elite at the UNC are spending funds on new athletic stadiums, homecoming parades, and casting bronzes of Michael Jordan.
So if you can’t afford a RVO license donate something less than that to a university or other reputable charitable fund to try and offset some of this massive military spending wastefulness. Even a pitiance helps: I donate $5 a month each the hsus.org and OURrescue.org. Why, with the massive government police and defense budgets and law books stacked so high they would go to Pluto and back, such charitable organizations are even needed to make up for lack of government resolve to do the right thing is beyond me, but I’ve seen the evidence and it’s there for anyone else to see as well, government official or not.
Last statement / complaint from me on RVO.
I just bought Aron’s A* Pathfinding solution. Is there currently a local avoidance solution? If it’s missing I can see that being quite a big problem. I realise that the licensing issue isn’t his fault, but a work-around would be great. In my mind a simple steering solution that maybe has an event that fires if it gets stuck would be fine. Or can an existing steering solution be hooked into this product?
Hi
Sorry, there is currently no local avoidance solution included.
Since the local avoidance solution previously included in the project was almost completely separate (only something like 10 lines of code bound the two systems together), incorporating another local avoidance system shouldn’t be very hard.
Okay. Roughly where would these 10 lines go? 
In the AIPath script (or whatever movement script you are using). You can open that script and take a look at how it was done, that code is still in the project.
The local avoidance system I wrote was designed to be an almost drop in replacement for the character controller, so basically you would call MyRVOAgent.Move (…) and it would move, but with local avoidance.
I am not sure how other local avoidance systems are designed and if they are as easy to incorporate.
Thanks so much for the help. I hope you’re still working on new features, always nice to be involved with a living project!
So, there’s no way we can use RVO now? even if we use the AIPath you mention above?
No. Or well, you could use it, but only for educational purposes, and I don’t want to release it because people will definitely be disappointed when they hear that they cannot use it in an actual game.
Good news: I have been working on a replacement for the local avoidance system. The basic components are working now and I have just sent away an email to UNC to ask them to read through the code and confirm that it is not based on RVO2 library code. Hopefully I will be able to add in RVO again soon (though initially it will be a lot more limited than the previous system).
Dump the RVO thing and implement something by yourself.
Even a quick and dirty solution with O(n^2) complexity would do right now.
I mean, implementing some basic steering / flocking shouldn’t be that hard, if your code was modular as you said.
Provide a patch, it doesn’t need to be the solution to all problems. You can search for a better lib and wrap it after you provide some immediate-relief.
Something >> nothing
EDIT: just read the last comment. Yay!
Hi @aron_granberg,
Very sad to hear about the RVO licensing issue.
I’m using your project for pathfinding and local avoidance for my game, which is in a pretty late stage of development. It’s very inconvenient to make such low level changes in such late stage.
I’m currently running version 3.2.5.1 and my question is would there be an issue if I don’t upgrade to the latest version? Is there a possibility for a DMCA notice from UNC if lets say the game becomes popular enough? If that’s okay, can I upgrade to the latest version which supports RVO, which is 3.4.1 I believe?
Your product has been working like a charm so far, I really, really wouldn’t like to replace it.
Thanks, Aron!