Path following and steering

Sometimes, we want our AI characters to roam around in the game world, following a roughly-guided or thoroughly-defined path. For example, in a racing game, the AI opponents need to navigate the road. In an RTS game, your units need to be able to get from wherever they are to the location you tell them navigating through the terrain and around each other.

To appear intelligent, our agents need to be able to determine where they are going, and if they can reach that point, they should be able to route the most efficient path and modify that path if an obstacle appears as they navigate. As you'll learn in later chapters, even path following and steering can be represented via a finite state machine. You will then see how these systems begin to tie in.

In this book, we will cover the primary methods of pathfinding and navigation, starting with our own implementation of an A* Pathfinding System, followed by an overview of Unity's built-in Navigation Mesh (NavMesh) feature.