Comment by johnh-hn

Indeed. There is something satisfying about building these and watching them in full flow.

A couple of years ago, I completed a pathfinding assignment designed by David Churchill (https://www.cs.mun.ca/~dchurchill/) for his Algorithmic Techniques for AI course. I'm not a student, and only his students have access to the actual assignment files, so I made a faithful recreation of it by looking at slides he had on a video at the time. The assignment is about pathfinding on a 2D grid. That's fun enough, but I've wanted to put my own spin on it.

Over the past few weeks, I revisited this and applied it to real-world mapping data from OpenStreetMap instead. It uses OverPass API (https://dev.overpass-api.de/) to fetch the data, which is free to use. The data loading times can be a little unpredictable, especially for larger search areas, but I'm happy with it how it turned out. You can find it here if you're interested: https://johnh.co/projects/openstreetmap-pathfinding/