Horde of NavMeshAgents - stops to recalculate path.

I know this is an old thread, but this could be useful for some people: On your NavMeshAgent uncheck autobraking. This will not allow them to stop when recalculating the path.

NavMesh.SetDestination is an asynchronous call but I don't think it is multi threaded. So I am guessing if the core this is using gets maxed out then it throws stuff in a queue and "gets around to it" when there is time/CPU.

My fix was to replace NavMesh.SetDestination with NavMesh.CalculatePath. Create a new path, set your agent to the new path and update the path periodically with NavMesh.CalculatePath. This is not asynchronous and you might lose a little performance.

Now your agents will not stop when system is taxed. Also, you can rely on the path and time the agent takes to get to the destination being consistent. Thinking of "Tower Defence" games where this would be critical.

With the help of the answer of Foulcloud and the unity documentation page about NavMesh.CalculatePath I came up with something like this script, that seems to work pretty well for a tower defence game I'm working on. The only thing you need to change to make the agent move to a new destination is changing the destination variable to something new, for instance in a coroutine:

using UnityEngine; using System.Collections; using UnityEngine.AI;

public class Agent : MonoBehaviour { public Transform target; public float pathUpdateFrequency = 2.0f;

 private NavMeshAgent navMeshAgent;
 private NavMeshPath path;
 private float elapsed;
 private Vector3 destination;

 void Awake ()
 {
     navMeshAgent = GetComponent<NavMeshAgent>();
 }
 
 void Start ()
 {
     path = new NavMeshPath();
     elapsed = pathUpdateFrequency;

     StartCoroutine(TravelToDestination());
 }
 
 void Update ()
 {
     elapsed += Time.deltaTime;
     if (elapsed > pathUpdateFrequency)
     {
         elapsed -= pathUpdateFrequency;
         NavMesh.CalculatePath (transform.position, destination, navMeshAgent.areaMask, path);
         navMeshAgent.SetPath (path);
     }

     for (int i = 0; i < path.corners.Length - 1; i++)
     {
         Debug.DrawLine (path.corners [i], path.corners [i + 1], Color.red);    
     }    
 }

 IEnumerator TravelToDestination ()
 {
     print ("Traveling towards destination..");
     destination = target.position;

     while (Vector3.Distance (transform.position, target.position) > 0.16f)
     {
         yield return null;
     }

     navMeshAgent.Warp(destination);
     print("Reached destination!");
 }

}