Improving Heuristics for Pathfinding in Games
نویسنده
چکیده
Pathfinding is used extensively in modern computer games: more efficient pathfinding allows for more units and bigger games. Several heuristics already exist to improve the performance beyond that of heuristics as the Manhattan distance when used in the A* search algorithm. In this paper, the new Boundary Heuristic (along with several variants) is introduced in order to attempt to increase the performance even further. The Boundary Heuristic attempts to identify regions in which the more simple heuristics, such as the Manhattan distance, provide correct results. The distance between the edges of these areas are calculated prior to the pathfinding. All heuristics are evaluated by performing a large number of pathfinding searches on different map types. The experimental results show performance improvements of the Boundary Heuristic on three of the four different map types.
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