I am evaluating a purchase of Apex for my project, which is a procedural generated open world sandbox. Tiles are used to generate a seamless terrain and I intend to use a pathfinding product to enable AI movement.
If you imagine both grids to just be flat, open areas; it is quite noticeable when AI’s employ behaviour (2) .
Is it possible to achieve (3) or (4) with Apex?
If this is just a limitation of A* pathfinding in general – is there a better way to approach the problem?
Apex Path will do (4), or actually slightly better as it would have taken the diagonal at the portal crossing instead of the lateral.
There will however always be a node on each side of a portal, so a pure (3) will only happen on perfect diagonal or cardinal moves.
So it is not a limitation of A* when Unity’s mesh operates differently, as A* itself will always attempt to find the shortest path. What Unity must be doing, in their implementation, is find the nearest crossable point instead of finding the point resulting in the shortest route.