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That’s pathfinding. I thought you were opposed to pathfinding?
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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.
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Not only is that pathfinding, it sounds like an especially complex pathfinding algorithm that would be pretty challenging to implement efficiently.
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In what way?
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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.

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