Marchline

Deterministic, massively scalable pathfinding for Unity games with armies.

Marchline is navigation middleware built for RTS, tower defense, colony sims, and horde games — thousands of units finding their way, avoiding each other, and arriving sensibly, under a few milliseconds a frame.

Why Marchline

• One-line API. agent.MoveTo(target) — world scanning, planning, crowd avoidance, and arrival all happen behind it.
• Armies are the default. Group orders coalesce into shared flow fields automatically: 1,000 units to one point costs barely more than 50.
• Bit-deterministic. Fixed-point core, identical across Windows, macOS, and Linux, x64 and arm64 — lockstep multiplayer without desyncs, enforced by golden-hash tests in CI on every commit.
• Live worlds. Build a wall mid-wave and every unit reroutes; jammed chokepoints get priced and crowds swing to another gate on their own.
• Honest failure. No route means Unreachable — reported, explained in the inspector, and automatically retried when the world opens up.

Sixty-second start

1. Install the package.
2. Empty GameObject → Add Component → Marchline → Nav World. It scans your obstacles on Play.
3. On any unit: Add Component → Marchline → Marchline Agent.
4. Move it:

GetComponent<Marchline.MarchlineAgent>().MoveTo(target.position);

Whole army: navWorld.MoveGroup(selectedUnits, clickPoint) — add keepFormation: true to keep the shape.

Performance (measured, not projected)

On an Apple M2 Max, release builds, from the repository bench suite: 10,000 actively repathing agents ≈ 0.5 ms/tick of planning; a full 10,000-agent simulation tick including separation, anticipatory steering, and hard collision ≈ 2 ms; a 256×256 flow-field build ≈ 1.5 ms; 50,000 cached-follow agents ≈ 1.4 ms. Budgets are counted in deterministic work units, never wall-clock, so lockstep peers stay bit-identical.

Documentation

• Manual — setup, components, presets, groups & formations, dynamic worlds, debugging, performance guidance
• Migrating from Unity NavMesh
• Migrating from A* Pathfinding Project
• Determinism & lockstep guide

Status

Marchline is in closed beta ahead of its Unity Asset Store release. Questions, beta interest, or studio licensing: support@marchline.dev