Well, ish. My theory is that you can have units make individual local choices that add up to somewhat inept pathfinding, and it works out cheaper than maintaining live-updated whole-map pathfinding information.
Well, if each unit leaves its own scent trail, that’s a lot of per-unit state, and little to nothing that you can pre-compute for the entire map. You could have all units trails on a global “scent layer” that all units read from, but then you’re basically just building up a graph of common paths that could have been precomputed for the entire map.
It also doesn’t at all address inter-unit collisions, which is a big topic in RTS pathfinding.
Well, ish. My theory is that you can have units make individual local choices that add up to somewhat inept pathfinding, and it works out cheaper than maintaining live-updated whole-map pathfinding information.
Not only is that pathfinding, it sounds like an especially complex pathfinding algorithm that would be pretty challenging to implement efficiently.
In what way?
Well, if each unit leaves its own scent trail, that’s a lot of per-unit state, and little to nothing that you can pre-compute for the entire map. You could have all units trails on a global “scent layer” that all units read from, but then you’re basically just building up a graph of common paths that could have been precomputed for the entire map.
It also doesn’t at all address inter-unit collisions, which is a big topic in RTS pathfinding.