Overview

In this chapter, movement will be the main goal. How we achieve movement or use other tools to introduce movement are the questions we have to ask. Now that you're comfortable with some of the tools we use in AI, we have to make the AI capable of its most common action: movement. The system we use to introduce movement into AI is called Path Finding.

The way Path Finding works is by getting positions within the space designated as traversable. These start and end positions are fed to a function that computes the shortest path between the two positions. The algorithm uses relative position information, such as whether or not it is blocked by an object or actor, and prevents this position from being traversable. This is extremely useful when trying to generate a path in a world with dynamically moving objects.