3D RTS pathfinding

Posted by xcrypt on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by xcrypt
Published on 2012-04-15T15:16:22Z Indexed on 2012/04/15 17:50 UTC
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I understand the A* algorithm, but I have some trouble doing it in 3D to suit the needs of my RTS

Basically, in the game I'm making, there will be agents with different sizes of OBB collision boxes.

I can use steering behaviours for avoiding other agents, so I don't need complete dynamic pathfinding. However, there is a problem because different agents have different collision geometry, and structures can be placed in almost any place. This means that there might be a gap between two structures where some agents can go through and some can't.

A solution I have found to this problem is to do a sweep of the collision geometry of the agent from start node of the edge the pf algorithm is currently testing, to the end node of that edge. But this is probably a bit overkill since every edge the algorithm tests would also have to create and test with a collision geometry sweep.

What are some reasonable approaches to this problem? I should mention that I'd prefer not to use navmeshes, I prefer waypoints because my entire system is based on it atm.

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