ROBLOX Studio: How do I make this NPC follow the nearest player which is always different and not sometimes run into the wall?

Question

ROBLOX Studio: How do I make this NPC follow the nearest player which is always different and not sometimes run into the wall? It looks like your post is mostly code; please add some more details.

 local larm = script.Parent:FindFirstChild("HumanoidRootPart")
 local rarm = script.Parent:FindFirstChild("HumanoidRootPart")

 function findNearestTorso(pos)
     local list = game.Workspace:children()
     local torso = nil
     local dist = math.huge
     local temp = nil
     local human = nil
     local temp2 = nil
     for x = 1, #list do
         temp2 = list[x]
         if (temp2.className == "Model") and (temp2 ~= script.Parent) then
             temp = temp2:findFirstChild("HumanoidRootPart")
             human = temp2:findFirstChild("Humanoid")
             if (temp ~= nil) and (human ~= nil) and (human.Health > 0) then
                 if (temp.Position - pos).magnitude < dist then
                     torso = temp
                     dist = (temp.Position - pos).magnitude
                 end
             end
         end
     end
     return torso
 end




 while true do
     wait(math.random(1,5))
     local target = findNearestTorso(script.Parent.HumanoidRootPart.Position)
     if target ~= nil then
         script.Parent.Humanoid:MoveTo(target.Position, target)
     end

 end

Answer 1

First off, make sure on line 5 you have game.Workspace:GetChildren() rather than game.Workspace:children()

Now in order to go about getting the closest player, you can create a table to store the distance of every player from your NPC: local playerDistances = {}. Now you can use a while loop around all of your NPC movement code (so that the NPC continues to follow the player). Inside the if statement where you check for temp, human, and human.Health, you can add the distance of the players HumanoidRootPart (the part that stores a player's position) from the NPC by doing table.insert(playerDistances,(<Player HumanoidRootPart>.Position-<NPC HumanoidRootPart>.Position).magnitude)

You can then refresh the table of distances every time the loop goes around by doing table.clear(playerDistances) right before the while loop's end. This ensures there is no unnecessary old data in the table that will mess with your NPC.

You can then access the closest player by doing playerDistances[1]

Now in order to not have the NPC run into a wall, I would recommend using Roblox Lua's PathfindingService. You can use :CreatePath(), :GetWaypoints(), :MoveTo(), and :MoveToFinished:Wait() to continuously make sure the NPC calculates an open path and can reach the player. Here are some links to the Developer Wiki page on PathfindingService:

https://developer.roblox.com/en-us/api-reference/class/PathfindingService
^^ All the functions, properties, etc.

https://developer.roblox.com/en-us/articles/Pathfinding
^^ How to use PathfindingService

note that you should also add the players HumanoidRootPart to the table as well since you cant make a path solely based on distance to do this just add another list with the same method stated above and append the player to this one instead of the distance.