Daily Archives: December 2, 2011

A Star – Is Born

Get it?

If not, then the following tech demo will likely be uninteresting to you. It’s a short and poorly coded version of A* that uses a binary heap to sort the OpenSet. There is room for a ton of improvement, but the goal was to make it work! You can select a different Normal Map or Hard Map. Then hit Pathfind. The yellow dot will try to find the green dot and then gobble it up.

If you are a coder, check out the source and cry. Then please help me figure out how to use objects the correct way.

Known Areas for Improvement

  • Nodes do not update if a cheaper F is found
  • The node is not actually checked to be in the closed set, it uses an updated grid value instead
  • Residual paths seem to stick around rather than be reset upon a new path find
  • Due to Manhattan distance, some paths don’t look natural