Astar (A*) Pathfinding Demonstration
As you might know as a result of browsing through my Portfolio, I have always been interested in Artificial Intelligence, Pathfinding, and stuff like that.A good while ago, back in 2004, I decided I wanted to grasp the basics of one of the most popular pathfinding algorithms there is, A*.
Then on a rainy sunday afternoon I decided to redesign the primitive version I got to work, to a more visually appealing version, and in the process I added some more interaction to it.
Well here it is, my A*-demonstration program, programmed in Flash. I learned the basics from http://www.policyalmanac.org/games/aStarTutorial.html
In the images attached you can see the algorithm working. It is searching a path from the green tile to the red tile. In the righthand section of the screenshots you can see various status messages from the algorithm, along with calculations.
You can specify the number of wall blocks (impassable tiles) that must be placed on the field, as well as how many steps per second the algorithm iterates.
It's a very basic program, you can't place walls yourself, and for the quickest performance I suggest you set steps per second to a value of 200 and turn the output off, since the algorithm generates a lot of messages about what it's doing.
