Migrating from Unity Navigation

Guide to help you migrate from Unity Navigation to the A* Pathfinding Project.

In this guide, you will learn what Unity components correspond to which A* Pathfinding Project components and what major differences there are.

Feature comparison

If you are looking for a comparison between Unity's pathfinding and the A* Pathfinding Project, you might be interested in this page: Feature Comparison.

Architectural differences

The overall architecture is not too different; in both packages there are:

• Movement scripts, which tell the agent how to move and where it should move.

• Graphs, which describe where an agent can move.

• Temporary obstacles, which cut holes in the navmesh or update it in other ways.

• Off-mesh links, which allow an agent to move or jump between otherwise disconnected parts of the navmesh.

However, the names used differ between the packages.

Graph settings

Unity has a single graph type which automatically generates a navmesh. It is very similar to the RecastGraph in the A* Pathfinding Project. If you create a recast graph in this package, its settings will most likely seem familiar to you.

This package has several other graph types, however. For example, grid graphs, point graphs and navmesh graphs.

Local avoidance

Unity's package and this package both have local avoidance, and they work in a similar way.

If you are using the FollowerEntity movement script, it's built-in, like with Unity's NavMesh Agent. If you are using another movement script, it is handled by a separate component called the RVOController. You attach the RVOController to an object which already has a movement script to make it use local avoidance.

You will also need a single global instance of the RVOSimulator component, which handles all the calculations and has the global simulation settings.

AI Properties and methods

When interacting with a movement script, the names again differ between Unity's package and this package. Here's a list of the most used properties/methods and their corresponding properties/methods in this package: The IAstarAI interface is referenced here, which is an interface that all movement scripts (e.g. AIPath/ AILerp/ RichAI) implement.