RTS games often need to use fixed point arithmetic so simulation is the same on all clients on a network. This also includes pathfinding.
Ignoring the features such as path smoothing as i imagine those uses floats and i can easily modify it to use fixed point numbers…
Does the raw pathfinder always find the same path from A to B for a given graph on any computer architecture ?
Hi
The pathfinding mostly uses integers. There are some cases where floats are used, mostly for finding the closest node to a particular point and similar.
Everything is deterministic assuming floating point math is deterministic (which is apparently not necessarily true according to blizzard, even though it is probably true in >99% of all cases). The package does however use multithreading which can cause differences in timing of when paths are calculated, you will probably want to force path calculations to be synchronous in this case.
Thanks for the reply.
Regarding the floats for determining the closest node, are you referring to the heuristic function? If so does it have override so i can write my own integer based heuristic on top of it?
No, I mean when you search for a path it needs to find the closest node to the start point of the path and the end point.
The heuristic function does use floats too though.