Two different issues were causing a path search to not explore cells in order of the cheapest estimated route first. This meant the search could sometimes miss a cheaper route and return a suboptimal path.
- PriorityQueue had a bug which would cause it to not check some elements when restoring the heap property of its internal data structure. Failing to do this would invalidate the heap property, meaning it would not longer return the items in correct priority order. Additional tests ensure this is covered.
- When a path search encountered the same cell again with a lower cost, it would not update the priority queue with the new cost. This meant the cell was not explored early enough as it was in the queue with its original, higher cost. Exploring other paths might close off surrounding cells, preventing the cell with the lower cost from progressing. Instead we now add a duplicate with the lower cost to ensure it gets explored at the right time. We remove the duplicate with the higher cost in CanExpand by checking for already Closed cells.
Introduced also a small Unit test project to prove it.
- Separated caching capabilities from PathFinder class to increase cohesion and maintainability.
Refactored the pathfinding algorithm by extracting methods based on responsibilities like
calculating costs and reordering functions. These changes should provide a in average a small increase in
pathfinding performance and maintainability.
- Optimized the pathfinder algorithm to reuse calculations like the
MovementCost and heuristics.
- Introduced base classes, IPathSearch and IPriorityQueue interfaces,
and restructured code to ease readability and testability
- Renamed the PathFinder related classes to more appropriate names. Made the
traits rely on the interface IPathfinder instead of concrete PathFinder
implementation.
- Massive performance improvements
- Solved error with harvesters' Heuristic
- Updated the heuristic to ease redability and adjustability. D can be
adjusted to offer best paths by decreasing and more performance by
increasing it
- Refactored the CellLayer<CellInfo> creation in its own Singleton class
- Extracted the graph abstraction onto an IGraph interface, making the
Pathfinder agnostic to the definition of world and terrain. This
abstraction can help in the future to be able to cache graphs for similar
classes and their costs, speeding up the pathfinder and being able to feed
the A* algorithm with different types of graphs like Hierarchical graphs
