hi,
assign a leader, and set row and column offset for the others,
set group direction to leader’s actual angle,
all the follower units should do very short pathfinding in every frame to their desired positions (can be spread over more frames for better performance), calculated easily according to leader position, their r/c offset, and group direction,
when the group receives a new target, the pathfinding is done by the leader,
when leader starts to move, followers follow him within a frame,
by checking the leader’s path step positions when path is got, it is easy to define group direction for each step, and store it in an array,
when leader is going towards a new path step, group direction is updated, so the group moves nicely,
additionally I stored arrival direction too, which was possible to set by holding down right mouse button instead of clicking, and the difference vector of press and release positions gave the desired direction,
but in my personal opinion navmesh is not really fine for RTS, especially when you have many troops, and you want to see nicely collision avoiding units, with correct collision resolution if it finally happens. for example the above mentioned sample project handled crossing groups and collisions very badly (I used PhysX characters), and I also found the built in UE4 crowd AI behaving very badly in this situation (maybe it is possible to use effectively, and only I did something wrong, don’t know…). so finally I made my own hierarchical tile+area pathfinder, currently porting to UE4 C++.
p.s.
Hey, telling the charachers each frame to go to new destination is not very effective. Is’nt there a way to do it without it? maybe relate to all character as one object and move it?