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I was speaking about RTS and in the sense of Age of Empires 1 and Empire Earth. The main dev of both this titles Rick Goodwell mentioned A* was used in Empire Earth the first time, older AoE1 used an older less CPU intensive algo.

@omginternets:

> dates back ... extension of ... adds a few heuristics.

Blabla, BS.

Fact is Empire Earth was one of the very first computer games to use A* algo. Age of Empires 1 used a worse faster different algo.

Fact is in the age before Wikipedia and Google, decade old papers of obscure algos were more or less lost and forgotten. They were written on paper with no digital copy readly available. So game devs often reinvented things without not knowing of previous work, it took several years until the early 2000s that this old stuff got scanned and made public viewable.




> The main dev of both this titles Rick Goodwell mentioned A* was used in Empire Earth the first time, older AoE1 used an older less CPU intensive algo.

Citation? The only mention I can find about the pathfinding algorithm used by Age of Empires is this: http://artho.com/age/pathfinding.html

A* is supposed to be an optimization of Dijkstra's. I don't know why you call it CPU intensive.




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