Pathfinding in Unity ECS! (Epic Performance!)

[@CodeMonkeyUnity]

Here's some Pathfinding with Unity ECS that can go up to 50,000 units! These complex DOTS videos take a long time to make so if you find them helpful consider supporting on Patreon or picking up the Game Bundle 📍 www.patreon.com/unitycodemonkey 📦 unitycodemonkey.com/gamebundle.php

[@danmac64]

Love these, keep it up!

[@davtam]

Bought the bundle and look forward to keep on supporting you in the near future, you are really good at articulating DOTS.

[@CodeMonkeyUnity]

@@davtam Awesome! Thanks!

[@pureay2700]

@@CodeMonkeyUnity is it possible to make a grid using ecs or to make a 3d dynamic buffer or ecs compatible array. I'm converting my voxel system to ecs and i just can't figure out a ecs equivalent to [, ,] array.

[@joris9467]

Please do the simple RTS, would really like to see some of these things in a complex environment. Always nice to watch!

[@saehoon2002]

It would be super cool and useful for this tutorial to be updated with new ecs version 1.0.11

[@mattshroom33]

ECS ! Thank you!

[@serious07]

It would be cool to see this system with an agent radius added to it, so that the units do not overlap and go around each other.

[@CodeMonkeyUnity]

Yeah I've thought about making a Unit Avoidance System using the Quadrant System I made previously as a base kzbin.info/www/bejne/noGXh6hsf8etidE Should be pretty fast

[@SkeletonBill]

This seems to be outdated as of Entities 0.51, the syntax doesn't work, and rolling back to an old version caused a bunch of other problems. Any chance of an updated video for 2022?

[@CodeMonkeyUnity]

Yeah I haven't touched DOTS in some years, no idea how different the code is nowadays. I'm only planning on getting back to it after 1.0 release sometime next year.

[@c0335]

12:55 I had to define PathFollow as a struct, otherwise it confused the compiler when running the Entities.ForEach in the PathFollowSystem.

[@briangelhorn407]

that's true

[@briangelhorn407]

probably due to updates to the entity system because a couple of months have passed since this video and for example now you do not need to do the temporary ijob, you just have to place the same as the componentsystem to the dynamic buffer and it works

[@JRX]

When there are changes in the scenario while the unit is still in movement, it simply passes through the new obstacle. By changing the unit's behavior to redo the pathfinding when there is a change in the scenario, that was solved, but then a problem became obvious: When the unit tries to find a path and is not in the center of a node, the unit goes back to its center, and that could allow exploitation from the player. A simple fix for it was to remove the initial node from the path in the calculatePath method, and that made pathfinding retries seamless. I plan to make a free path tower defense game, and this is going to be very useful. Thank you very much.

[@CodeMonkeyUnity]

Yup normally that's what I do, calculate the path again if something changes or just over time and always ignore the first path position.

[@tfmate-ij5em]

any way to avoid graph recreation for each unit?

[@dreirxge]

This could definitely be used for management type games.

[@dsfmdiya7500]

Me: I wanna sleep because it’a 12 o’clock where I live Code Monkey: Drops this video Me: SLEEP IS FOR THE WEAK

[@adamodimattia]

Fantastic material as always. I have a small problem though, after converting to entity my unit becomes invisible, it still is in the debugger, but apparently is not visible. And yes, an RTS game in DOTS would be amazing! Please do.

[@CodeMonkeyUnity]

Do you have the Hybrid Renderer package installed?

[@adamodimattia]

@@CodeMonkeyUnity No, I completely forgot about it! It is that for sure. Thanks

[@antonlovchikov630]

Hi! Thank you for the project for downloading! Trying to get it running but get an error Assets/DOTS_Pathfinding/Scripts/PathFollowSystem.cs(65,123): error CS1061: 'EntityCommandBuffer' does not contain a definition for 'ToConcurrent' and no accessible extension method 'ToConcurrent' accepting a first argument of type 'EntityCommandBuffer' could be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?) Did they changed the API? Do you know how to fix this part?

[@gladiumcaeli]

Really curious now to see how many units it can handle with both system being used

[@TylerButh]

Just an FYI, I am literally following along with some of this code and a few times you've done massive deletes and reformatting and you sped up the code so that it was really really hard to see what you actually did. I can figure it out looking at before and after but it makes it pretty confusing. An example is around 11:30. You added pathPositionBuffer then you perhaps make a delete and comment out some code but it goes very fast so it's hard to tell.

[@l.driver-williams5482]

Nice tutorial, very informative. Just one question though. Is there a specific reason you used your own implementation of grid rather than the one packaged with unity?

[@rafalwilczek2301]

Thinking, how to set Grid is already Occupied when unit stay now here, every step checking if path is still valid & next grid is not occupied by somebody. Thinking how to implement, "Collisions Like", 2 units can't stay/walk on same grid in same time :) somebody must be first

[@yancur]

Unfortunately this no longer works with newer version of DOTS :( It even crashes the compiler.

[@CodeMonkeyUnity]

The syntax is going to be very different nowadays but the core data oriented logic is still applicable

[@yancur]

@@CodeMonkeyUnity Yeah, I tried to change the code according to the new syntax, but when the compiler itself has thrown an exception and prompted me to send BUG report, I have given up. That's way over my current skill to delve deeper. But yes, definitely the logic of the video still applies. Thank you!

[@Kryonnnn]

"at 26:15" if you update unity now [NativeDisableContainerSafetyRestriction] work on the DynamicBuffer and everything goes pretty smothly

[@Kryonnnn]

@@LaCreArthur i had a similar issue, but it occur only cus I had a 200x200grid

[@scriptsengineer]

Note: ComponentSystem is deprecated after 0.11, use SystemBase instead.

[@ChadAKA]

Have you gotten it to work with SystemBase? I'm having a hard figuring this out.

[@scriptsengineer]

@@ChadAKA Yes, but no perfect code: this update code protected override void OnUpdate() { int2 gridSize = buildCellSystem.dimensions; List findPathJobs = new List(); NativeList jobHandles = new NativeList(Allocator.Temp); NativeArray pathNodeArray = PathUtils.GetPathNodeArray(buildCellSystem.cells, buildCellSystem.dimensions); var ecb = commandBufferSystem.CreateCommandBuffer(); Entities.ForEach((Entity entity,ref PathfindingParams pathfindingParams)=> { NativeArray tmpPathNodeArray = new NativeArray(pathNodeArray,Allocator.TempJob); FindPathJob findPathJob = new FindPathJob { gridSize = gridSize, pathNodeArray = tmpPathNodeArray, startPosition = pathfindingParams.startPosition, endPosition = pathfindingParams.endPosition, entity = entity, offsetDistance = pathfindingParams.buildSize }; findPathJobs.Add(findPathJob); jobHandles.Add(findPathJob.Schedule()); ecb.RemoveComponent(entity); }).WithoutBurst().Run(); JobHandle.CompleteAll(jobHandles); foreach(FindPathJob findPathJob in findPathJobs) { new SetBufferPathJob { entity = findPathJob.entity, gridSize = findPathJob.gridSize, pathNodeArray = findPathJob.pathNodeArray, pathfindingParamsComponentDataFromEntity = GetComponentDataFromEntity(), pathFollowComponentDataFromEntity = GetComponentDataFromEntity(), pathPositionBufferFromEntity = GetBufferFromEntity() }.Run(); } pathNodeArray.Dispose(); }

[@scriptsengineer]

@@ChadAKA Note: gridSize is my class of code cell grids

[@ChadAKA]

@@scriptsengineer Thank you so much! This worked great.

[@people_fly13]

there is no JPS (not JPS+) tutorials or unity implementation available in web at all, it would be great if you make such video, cause i do not see reason to still use simple A* when it is so bad at performance compared to JPS

[@CodeMonkeyUnity]

That's definitely something I want to look into but basic unoptimized DOTS Pathfinding is already insanely fast so not sure if the added complexity is worth it.

[@zerovega9604]

Does this still work? Can't even get the sample scene working, the sprite doesn't show up on the grid. All i did was add the Project Files and Utilities and installed Entities. Only had one deprecation that seems to have been fixed with .ParallelWriter

[@RTWrename]

I am assuming that I can use this with a tileset? if so what should I look for to implement it on the tileset?

[@LaCreArthur]

Hello, I'm using this code for some agents of my game and I have a performance issue, if my game runs for a while I have some frames that freezes, using the profiler I have a big spike with 98% of it being the "Pathfinding:FindPathJob (Burst)" Nothing special happened in the gameplay, just random frame freezes after 3-5 minutes... Anyone have any idea what it can be ? Note that I have updated the packages for [NativeDisableContainerSafetyRestriction] to work on the DynamicBuffer

[@rafalwilczek2301]

If i understand good, the jobs are made in order? Meaning in multiplayer server, when i handle server to do jobs, it gonna make one by one with so efficiency? Won't making some parrarel example add > occupied position to list in same time when somebody adding it & than 2 player gonna move on same tile ;p Bcs if its so efficient, its amazing. To Handle Many Player computations + many monsters computations as well!

[@nikowill6979]

Great tutorial. Is there any way to let the entity to chase the player...set endPos as player position seems not enough.

[@KyubIchigo2]

Is it necessary to have so many separate files or is this something you're doing for clarity sake? I could see this being a problem when making a game with so many systems and components.

[@TwoVera]

Please show us how you did the animation with seperate meshes for your characters

[@CodeMonkeyUnity]

I cover how my animation system works here kzbin.info/www/bejne/Z2LGaqWNh9SngJo

[@tomnorc3249]

great video i'm a little confused on how you get the data from the game object grid though, still awesome stuff!

[@CodeMonkeyUnity]

The Grid class is fully created in this video kzbin.info/www/bejne/rZKopHqrYpJshpo kzbin.info/www/bejne/bpvVcoqqfp2Fjsk So here all I'm doing is cycling through the grid and testing if the isWalkable boolean is true or false

[@tomnorc3249]

@@CodeMonkeyUnity thank you! i managed to hook my own grid up that automatically checks my terrain for unwalkable parts thanks to this, excellent ecs work, just finished watching the rest of the videos, thanks again

[@provunity3582]

Why is not possible to add a 300x300 cell grid? Seems like it hasn't enough time to get updated. Does anybody know any quick fix for that?

[@leonidus101]

Does the new update in Unity 03.2021 LTS make this code obsolete?

[@CodeMonkeyUnity]

The Unity version shouldn't matter much but what does matter is the Entities version which just received a massive update. I haven't looked into it yet but I would assume there's quite a lot of syntax changes however the data-oriented logic for handling pathfinding is still valid.

[@treymtz]

IMPORTANT FOR NEW ECS 1.0.1: The workflow has changed. There is no component called convert to entity, because you instead create a new sub scene and place the gameobject in there to bake it into an Entity.

[@mana20]

Any idea if it scales well for larger maps? I guess you could use the hierarchical nodes to reduce some of the blunt force path finding.

[@CodeMonkeyUnity]

Sure it scales very well and continues to be very fast in a large map. But regardless of how fast it is at some point you need to use multiple maps, can't have the entirety of Skyrim in a single Pathfinding map.

[@돼지비빔밥]

진심으로 감사합니다.

[@omarkhalaf8735]

Hello Sir, Code Monkey I'm new to the channel but i find this really useful and helpful and i enjoy your content, also i plan on watching some if not all of your series regarding game dev, so after all of this my question is : could you give an advice from which source should i learn beginner and advanced either game dev or C# in general ? i know some of the sources myself but i'd love to know your recommendations. Thanks, sorry for the long comment.

[@CodeMonkeyUnity]

If you're a complete beginner in Unity watch these videos to get acquainted with the engine kzbin.info/aero/PLzDRvYVwl53vxdAPq8OznBAdjf0eeiipT After that try making a complete game like this kzbin.info/www/bejne/mGa6oaGfbrCDn80

[@omarkhalaf8735]

@@CodeMonkeyUnity Thank you sir for your guidance, i will make sure to follow your instructions.

[@MNenad]

Awesome video as always! But even with your files I could't reproduce the project in a version that is lying flat on the ground (y swapped with z-axis). Somehow the grid that is used for pathfinding doesn't match the grid from the Grid class (visible in scene)... I cannot get the grid position recalculated into world position properly. Did someone experience similar problems? Thx in advance

[@andrewshandle]

I need to rewatch the part on the race condition after the Super Bowl is over. I'm a little confused why the system is convinced that accessing a Component from a specific entity would be unsafe, or is it specifically because it's a Buffer? Let's say you had a job to handle projectiles, at any given time you might have hundreds of bullets/arrows/rockets/frying pans flying around the screen, so would those need to be unsafe to be able to use multiple threads?

[@CodeMonkeyUnity]

The issue is potentially having 2 separate jobs accessing the array with the same entity index and writing to it. You have 2 jobs trying to write to the same memory which would cause a crash, the compiler tries to protect you from that by disallowing that by default. This system uses the NativeArray for the Pathfinding which is why I cannot use a IJobForEach or IJobParallelFor, when you use those interfaces it automatically accesses only a single index so it works fine concurrently without disabling safety.

[@andrewshandle]

@@CodeMonkeyUnity Ah, okay, that makes complete sense. I'm cooking a bunch of food for a Super Bowl party, so I didn't have a chance to go back and watch that part again. ;) Your videos on DOTS have been great, so keep up the great work!

[@simeonvasilev4074]

Hello, first thank you for the tutorials that you are making, they are really useful. I just have one question - I am not able to find MeshUtils in Utils package that you provided, are you able to share it or just to mention, what is the purpose of GetQuaternionEuler method, it should return float based on input float(I am a little bit confused here). Thanks in advance!

[@stien387]

Very nice video! I tried to apply this in my own project, but I have a really hard time providing the paths back to my "normal" object based scripts and mono behaviours. Do you have any suggestions on how I can provide a list of vectors / grid positions back to a mono behaviour after the job is complete. Thanks!

[@CodeMonkeyUnity]

I covered using this mixed with Game Objects here kzbin.info/www/bejne/jqDQnYd-ntl0q8k

[@SuperKemito]

I would like to see your approach to using more physics in ECS. It failed hard to do so in GGJ2020. ECS also limits using skin mesh renderer, animations?

[@BeerfootBandit]

this is some pretty amazing stuff! Can entities be enabled/disabled for pools? I was thinking about making a small simple DOTS rts based on your tutorials

[@blakeguyan2662]

Hey, When i convert over the script for my pathfinding i get a whole raft of errors stating i need an object reference to a non static field. I realise that its because you converted the function calculatePath to a static, i just dont understand why i am getting it and you didnt?

[@blakeguyan2662]

OK Mystery solved.. i had a rogue closing bracket after the Dispose commands that locked off the functions being called from the main function which was the root of the error! also, anyone coming from the last tutorial might run into a weird pathfinding error caused by the grid size being too small! you need to always make sure your grid size is LARGER than the coordinates you are trying to pathfind to, if you find you are getting some odd results, thats why!

[@nandorbacso4625]

What's the difference between this and the DOTS video?

[@CodeMonkeyUnity]

This one applies that Pathfinding code to the Entity Component System so you can add components to request a path and calculate it

[@stien387]

Hi Code Money, great content! It is very informative and help me out a lot! I have one question, in my own project I try to overlay a pathfinding grid over an existing tile-based Gameworld and do a an physics overlap collider check for every cell in the grid. I was wondering if there is a better solution to this. Thank you! Keep up the great work!

[@CodeMonkeyUnity]

If you do it very rarely then yes that is a very nice and easy approach. It only becomes an issue if you constantly update your Pathfinding map, if so then it would be best to keep a separate grid just holding a boolean and you update that manually when you modify the map.

[@somacruz10]

oh is this can be helpful for 3d rts?

[@CodeMonkeyUnity]

Its especially useful for RTS where you have tons of units and complex maps

[@kira7683]

This is some wizardry

[@paulrobinson5490]

Hi CM. I'm in the process of putting a game onto the play store, have you any idea what I name the pricing template, is it the game name or something else. There is nothing to suggest what it should be and don't want to screw up :(. Nice vid by the way, as usual :)

[@mark-johnhenry2465]

what version of unity is this using and ecs?

[@CodeMonkeyUnity]

This video is pretty old by now so chances are the syntax has changed a lot. Although the high level core concepts are still applicable.

[@mark-johnhenry2465]

@@CodeMonkeyUnity thanks for the response. I have successfully converted to v1 I believe. however there's a few more steps I need to complete. one of them is attaching am missing mono behaviour on prefabentitycomponent which is in the scene. could you tell me what script this. mono behaviour also missing on the unit game object.. it would be a great help

[@mark-johnhenry2465]

never mind I have the project working in the latest ecs.

[@hbirtt]

I feel like this is one of those things that is simple once it clicks, but it's still pretty abstract to me after watching this. All of the references to other code and concepts made it hard to follow for me. I have learned a lot from your videos, so I hope you see this for constructive criticism because that's what I'm going for. I'm sure this stands as a great "tie things together" video for people who fully understand all of these concepts. I'm going to put together which order to watch all of the related videos in and I'm sure I will get it all then. Maybe you could create a playlist with these in the order to follow, assuming you haven't done that?

[@CodeMonkeyUnity]

Are you familiar with the core A* Pathfinding algorithm? If not I covered how it works here kzbin.info/www/bejne/l524YWeeq99pgpY This ECS version is a more complex version of that same algorithm.

[@hbirtt]

@@CodeMonkeyUnity The A* algorithm is actually pretty simple, so that wasn't bad. It was dots and some of the other stuff that I didn't keep up with. I'm pretty sure you have covered all of this individually. Just need to figure out which order to watch in. Again, great stuff, and I appreciate it. Just pointing out what my experience was finding this video first.

[@CodeMonkeyUnity]

@@hbirtt Yeah I understand, on KZbin each video has to be relatively small and I cant control which one people see first, I put all my DOTS videos in this Playlist kzbin.info/aero/PLzDRvYVwl53s40yP5RQXitbT--IRcHqba

[@hbirtt]

@@CodeMonkeyUnity That's great. I didn't realize how much content you had around the subject. You bring a lot of good stuff to the table man. Thanks. I've migrated my latest project to Godot just to see how I like doing the same project in each, but I'm sure I'll be using Unity again and this will be helpful stuff.

[@Taobyby]

I bought all your games. Do I owe you now? Just kidding, thx for your videos. 🙂 Friendly criticism: Sometimes you skip important parts in your videos, or change some parts between videos, which forces me to download the project files from your site. While this is no big problem, to me it feels kinda like (self)cheating and sometimes it takes a lot of time to find the little difference you included between 2 videos. :-)

[@CodeMonkeyUnity]

I hope you like the games! Thanks! That's the issue with KZbin videos, if I make them super long then no one watches, so I have to be very careful to only show the interesting parts, no one will watch a video of me refactoring some code to prepare for the "next" tutorial. To solve that is why I have my courses, in there I can spend as much time as needed going step by step without worrying about the algorithm punishing me.

[@OIL938]

Is ECS ready to use?

[@457Deniz457]

Seems so ! :D

[@dr_UiD]

Yes, if you willing to write almost every system yourself. Animation, pathfinding, rendering, input, ui, physics interpolations😊

[@WhoOne]

Still in preview, but quite useful right now for some parts of the game.

[@INeatFreak]

if you're not gonna make just some prototype/experiment stuff i would suggest you to wait for a while till unity devs make ecs as flexible as the current one.

[@dr_UiD]

@@INeatFreak yeah, for 2-3+ years 🤣

[@haithammahmoud6825]

can u please make tutorial how to make 3D dynamic roads (path) or floors like tycoon games thanks

[@mrcyberpunk]

Interesting but I'd like to see how it performs with actor to actor collisions. I think the number would be half that. Still impressive though.

[@CodeMonkeyUnity]

Yup I'm planning on combining this Pathfinding with DOTS Physics by having units calculate a path through a small tunnel and push each other around to see how performant that is.

[@juliusborn5953]

@@CodeMonkeyUnity Is there some video about that?

[@humanDNA]

Comment for YT algorithm

[@INeatFreak]

is this a reupload?

[@falsecalamity]

No I believe this is the follow up to the Pathfinding in unity with DOTS video

[@CodeMonkeyUnity]

Like Daniel said, this is a continuation of the previous video. In that video I covered making Pathfinding with the Job System and the Burst Compiler and with this one I apply it to the Entity Component System.

[@naeemali2942]

game graphics quality is low when i play it on an android device for testing Plz help plz help

[@roudikk]

For future vidz.. please.. dark editor.. my eyes

[@roudikk]

oh and great vid

[@CodeMonkeyUnity]

Sorry, my eyes can't handle the dark theme

[@roudikk]

@@CodeMonkeyUnity all good this video helped me a lot, it's so weird that after 11 months from this video still no out of the box mav mesh navigation properly im dots, or i cant find it 🤷‍♂️

[@arsenbabaev1022]

SO SIMPLE YEAH

[@tiagosousa5278]

the amount of ads.

[@CodeMonkeyUnity]

Feel free to support on Patreon and enable AdBlock

[@gamedev8567]

To be fair, it's a bit hard to follow the tutorial with all of the speeded-up time when you code. It makes it hard to write the code along with the video, especially when you scroll up and down changing little things. It's all speeded-up, which requires me to stop the video multiple times in order to write the code and try to make sure I'm writing it correctly. Now, I know there is a package for every video available free to download, but it's just not the same, you know? You are less likely to learn when copy-pasting code. And I know, the video might get over 2 hours long if you don't speed-up the coding, but for a complicated topic, such as ECS, it would make a lot of sense. I believe that only dedicated people would watch it and actually try to understand how it works, while complete beginners wouldn't be able to understand it either way. Unless they study the basics of c# and unity first, of course. So I just wanted to ask you, what do you think? I really like your videos, and I'll respect any choice you make and will try to follow along, even if it's sometimes hard.

[@fnaf0061]

Hi

[@dsfmdiya7500]

FNAF 00 Hi

[@fnaf0061]

Hi

[@fnaf0061]

subscribe like

[@MuftahDev]

JUST TELL ME HOW TO INSTALL THE FRICKING UTILIS FROM YOOOOU! :(

[@CodeMonkeyUnity]

Just open the Unitypackage and it will all be added into your scene