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Using Agent Avoidance

This section is about how to use agent avoidance with the NavigationServer and documents how agent avoidance is implemented in Godot.

For avoidance with NavigationAgents see Using NavigationAgents.

Agent avoidance helps to prevent direct collision with other agents or moving obstacles while the agents still follow their original velocity as best as possible.

Avoidance in Godot is implemented with the help of the RVO library (Reciprocal Velocity Obstacle). RVO places agents on a flat RVO map and gives each agent a radius and a position. Agents with overlapping radius compute a safe_velocity from their current velocity. The safe_velocity then needs to replace the original submitted velocity to move the actor behind the agent with custom movement code.

Note

RVO avoidance is not involved in regular pathfinding, it is a completely separate system. If used inappropriately, the RVO avoidance can actively harm the perceived pathfinding quality.

Creating Avoidance Agents with Scripts

Agents and obstacles share the same NavigationServer API functions.

Creating agents on the NavigationServer is only required for avoidance but not for normal pathfinding. Pathfinding is map and region navmesh based while avoidance is purely map and agent based.

GDScript

extends Node3D

var new_agent_rid: RID = NavigationServer3D.agent_create()
var default_3d_map_rid: RID = get_world_3d().get_navigation_map()

NavigationServer3D.agent_set_map(new_agent_rid, default_3d_map_rid)
NavigationServer3D.agent_set_radius(new_agent_rid, 0.5)
NavigationServer3D.agent_set_position(new_agent_rid, global_transform.origin)

To receive safe_velocity signals for avoidance for the agent a callback needs to be registered on the NavigationServer.

GDScript

extends Node3D

var agent_rid: RID = NavigationServer3D.agent_create()
NavigationServer3D.agent_set_callback(agent_rid, self.on_safe_velocity_computed)

func on_safe_velocity_computed(safe_velocity: Vector3):
    # do your avoidance movement

After the current and new calculated velocity needs to be passed to the NavigationServer each physics frame to trigger the safe_velocity callback when the avoidance processing is finished.

GDScript

func _physics_process(delta):

    NavigationServer3D.agent_set_velocity(current_velocity)
    NavigationServer3D.agent_set_target_velocity(new_velocity)

Warning

If _process() is used instead of _physics_process() at a higher framerate than physics the agent velocity should not be updated more than ones each physics frame e.g. by tracking the Engine.get_physics_frames().