About Unity
Unity is a free game development tool which allows you to easily create 3D games for different platforms. It is made up of an editor allowing you to easily change your game contents through a visual interface and an engine allowing you to execute the actual game. It is component based and supports different scripting languages as well as C#.
Why use it?
There are several reasons I chose Unity for my project. The first one of them is that I wanted to be able to show off my results visually without having to spend too much time implementing a graphical interface. Unity allows me to do so in 3D with no extra coding needed. The second reason is that I had never actually used the Unity engine before and I wanted to expand my knowledge and skills. Since Unity doesn't have a high learning curve and I already knew C# (one of the languages used for scripting in Unity) it seemed like a good idea to use it as part of my project. Finally, when I started my project, Unity didn't have pathfinding integrated into yet (unlike other engines such as Unreal Development Kit) which allowed me to create the pathfinding from scratch. However, the next release of Unity (version 3.5) will handle automatic navigation mesh generation and pathfinding. The beta version is already released and available for testing.
Pathfinding in Unity
As I previously mentioned, the version of Unity I am currently using (3.42) doesn't have pathfinding integrated into it. However, some users have provided packages and scripts implementing pathfinding for other users to use in their own projects.
AngryAnt's path project is available on Unity's assets store and is free to use as well as extensively documented. It allows the user to create waypoints and link them together in the editor using the Navigation inspector which is something that I definitely want to implement in my own project.
Arongranberg's A* Pathfinding Project is also available on the asset store and consists of two versions, one of them free. The project is more extensive than AngryAnt's as it also includes automatic navmesh generation, handling of many different graph types, use of path modifiers and support of different heuristics.
UnifyWiki (the wiki for unity related scripts, shaders and tutorials not included in the Unity package) also has a few examples of pathfinding scripts, including AStarHelper and WaypointMaster. Those scripts are pretty simple and while they provide an understanding of pathfinding, they do not however provide in-editor functionalities like the packages mentioned above.
AngryAnt's path project is available on Unity's assets store and is free to use as well as extensively documented. It allows the user to create waypoints and link them together in the editor using the Navigation inspector which is something that I definitely want to implement in my own project.
Arongranberg's A* Pathfinding Project is also available on the asset store and consists of two versions, one of them free. The project is more extensive than AngryAnt's as it also includes automatic navmesh generation, handling of many different graph types, use of path modifiers and support of different heuristics.
UnifyWiki (the wiki for unity related scripts, shaders and tutorials not included in the Unity package) also has a few examples of pathfinding scripts, including AStarHelper and WaypointMaster. Those scripts are pretty simple and while they provide an understanding of pathfinding, they do not however provide in-editor functionalities like the packages mentioned above.
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