HPA* Enhancements

Abstract

In video games, pathfinding must be done quickly and accurately. Not much computational time is allowed for pathfinding, but realistic looking paths are required. One approach to pathfinding which attempts to satisfy both of these constraints is to perform pathfinding on abstractions of the map. Botea et al.'s Hierarchical Pathfinding A* (HPA*) does this by dividing the map into square sectors and defining entrances between them. Although HPA* performs quick pathfinding which produces near-optimal paths, some improvements can be introduced. Here we discuss a faster path smoothing method, an alternative way to compute the weights of abstract edges, and lazy edge weight computations.