Creating a Grid for Pathfinding

Creating the grid in Unity

What the grid needs

Adjusting and representing the grid for debugging.

Firstly, we need to create two public integers (Numbers that can be accessed by any class) that control the width and length of the grid, and apply the main grid class to an empty object in Unity. The empty object will act as a manager for all our grid/pathfinding based classes and code. We only need the height and width variables as my demonstration will only handle pathfinding on a 2-dimensional scale.

We can see the variables in the properties window of the
empty object, and can adjust the variables accordingly.

Adding the public integers.

We then need to create a node class, which holds all the information for its relative grid node/square.

The node class stores whether the node is walkable, and the position of the node in the world.

Next we need to create a list of nodes the size of the grid, which is the grid's width times the grid's length. We then cycle through each node, giving it its world position and checking to see whether it is walkable or not. The node is then added to the list so it can be stored and used for later.

We then call the OnDrawGizmos function, which renders the specified shape onto the game screen. It's a debug tool as in the game we won't want to see the grid. The OnDrawGizmos function goes through each node in the grid, and renders a cube in the correct position and colours it red if it is not walkable (either there's an obstacle in the way or something else that I can pick). You can see the outcome here: