deprecated: kloot is already working on this

GSoC idea: Smarter pathfinder

Why

Current pathfinder is rather inflexible and inefficient.

What

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)
Knowledge of C++
Knowledge of Lua API/C bindings

Difficulty

Estimated: hard

Technical details

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