A tower defense mixed with real-time strategy where you repel attacking sentient AI robots until they give up.

Adjusting Paths for Unexpected Obstructions

To finish the pathfinding for units, units needed to find their way around buildings. Not just at the moment the path is created, but also during the path's execution to account for buildings created by the player after the path was made. To make buildings work with the pathfinding system, the buildings had to be grid snapped to the pathfinding nodes, and buildings width and length will be measured in whole nodes. For instance, this small bunker is one by one.

The pathfinding system was expanded to include a second buildable layer for units to find paths around. As buildings are built, the pathfinding grid will be updated and vice versa.

Units were then programmed to look for buildings between themselves and their next path node. If their path was in fact being obstructed by a building, the best way around it would be to find a new path which was expensive on the CPU. To limit pathfinding calls, buildings were listed for having already been accounted for and if the unit was in a group, the unit would notify the leader who will find a new path for the whole group.

In the case that an area is completely walled off and the pathfinding fails, a second pathfind will be made ignoring buildings and that path will be truncated where buildings are found. This way, units will still have a path towards the walled off area; solving the issue of islands with an extra pathfind instead of other more CPU intensive methods.

RTS Minimap

I found a really simple tutorial on how to make an RTS minimap in Unity by Alessandro Valcepina. At first glance, I thought that using a second camera for the minimap was a lazy and CPU intensive way to do it. But it turns out with the correct settings, this was a simple and light weight way to build a minimap.

I expanded on the minimap to register clicks and convert the minimap coordinates into game world coordinates by simply using proportions. With this, I was able to make the minimap move the camera anywhere on the map with a simple click.