Star craft maps update#
Star craft maps full#
Star craft maps plus#

I think the original Starcraft had this issue when units block a narrow path. With some games you can see particularly bad cases of the latter because a unit will continue running towards a valley even after it's been walled off, and only after hitting the wall it will turn back and go around. Or you could just let units naively trust the region graph until they bump into an obstacle.

Star craft maps update#

You could try to carefully update the region graph every time the map is altered, if the map is rarely altered in your game. The solution to this is up to your imagination. Of course the problem is that regions may change due to, for instance, buildings blocking a path or units temporarily obstructing a passageway. If you have a lot of islands this can really speed things up. For example, if we have 3 islands A, B, C with bridges 1 and 2 connecting A-B and B-C respectively, then units moving from A to C don't really need to search all of B every time, they only care about shortest way from bridge 1 to bridge 2.

Star craft maps plus#

When moving between distant locations, this should be much faster because you are now searching through a handful of nodes (on the region graph) plus a relatively small number of tiles, instead of the hundreds of tiles that comprise those regions.

Once in the same region, calculate path normally on the tile grid.

If different regions, calculate shortest path to target region first using the region graph from above.Then your pathfinding algorithm becomes two stage: Make a new graph where each region-region intersection is a node, and calculate shortest paths between them.When done, gradually expand outwards from all regions to encompass low-score tiles as well.Put all adjacent tiles with score above the threshold in the same region.Score every tile with distance to nearest impassable tile.In reality you would probably do this with some graph algorithm, not manually. For example, if the map is two islands connected by a narrow bridge, there would be three 'regions' - island 1, island 2, bridge. If the map does not change map, you can preprocess it to build a set of nodes representing regions of the map. Even on older games, optimizations are made to make it even faster, and you can see that unit will sometimes get lost or stuck, which shouldn't really happen with a general algorithm like A*.

Star craft maps full#

There is also a pretty good looking alternative here where it takes into account dynamic stuff like obstacles and still performs very well (video demo: ).ДЄnother interesting technique, does a completely different approach:Д¬alculate the shortest path from the goal position to every point on the map: see the full explanation here: - although this one is inefficient for large mapsДЇirst of all 100 units is not such a large number, pathfinding is fast enough on modern computers that it is not a big resource sink. In this wikipedia page it specifically mentions dijkstra's algorithm for path finding that works by subdividing the problem and store results to be reused. Unit2 goes from B to C.Д« to C only needs to be calculated once and can be reused by both. Unit1 goes from A to C but the shortest path goes through B. I guess it just needs to subdivide the problem and memoize the results.