GSoC Smarter pathfinder
GSoC idea: Smarter pathfinder
Why
Current pathfinder is rather inflexible and inefficient.
Background
Spring's pathfinder uses a 2d grid and is somewhat limited in functionality. A partial/full rewrite should be introduced to add support for navigating using more than 8 primary directions and selectively ignore certain unit types for performance reasons.
Spring's Lua API should be extended to allow game developers to push new nodes/links and be able to alter or delete existing ones. (for pathfinder-aware tunnels/teleporting/etc.)
Preferably this all should also be faster then the current system, or a compelling argument/experiment should be made that shows there can not be a faster system with the same features.
Required skills
- knowledge of graphs and pathfinding (particularly navigation graphs)
- C++ and Lua/C api
Difficulty
Estimated: hard
The pathfinder is one of the better encapsulated subsystems in spring; generally, there will only be minor changes required in the rest of the engine, if any. There's a lot of algorithmic work to do under the hood, though:
- Cooperative pathfinding exists in a very scant form and could be greatly improved
- Navigation mesh could be introduced for better paths and faster searches - at the cost of generating the mesh and updating it online due to terrain modification
