I just made a demo of the Pathfinding I did for Intense Ai to show to the good people at CIDER and I thought I'd post it here too.
Here's a screenie:
This is an implementation of the Points Of Visibility+Dijkstra technique and I'll be using it for the Standard and Extra Versions of Intense Ai. Versions from Commercial and above will be using a more advanced NavMesh+A* technique which doesn't require Node Placement at level design and is much more robust in complex levels.
The NavMesh technique is what I was aiming to do for the Standard version since I'm not too fond of precompiled Nodes and all, but I figured out it would push the release date of the Standard version at least 2 months behind..
Anyhow, having said that, besides from having to place nodes manually, this is a really fast pathfinding implementation which will support lots and lots of Bots with no problem at all and will produce excellent paths. In addition, I've made sure to keep the phase of Placing Nodes as easy as possible. All you have to do is scatter around some node models in your level and you're good to go. No need to define connections, edges, skills or anything else which takes most of your time. All this is done automatically. I'm also working on the idea of a Node Editor. If I see that this is nesseccery I'll have to implement that too.
