Mira has been doing a significant amount of work on the pathfinder across several pull requests, such so that it deserves its own blog post :-).
Technically speaking: The pathfinder is no longer a static class and is now adapted to the actual map size, which opens the door for larger maps without issues. Neighbour pre-computation reduces repeated calculations during each search.
A fast path was introduced for common cases to skip unnecessary work. Dead-end handling was improved so units do not get stuck as often. Octile distance is now used for more accurate diagonal movement cost estimation, which means units choose better routes.
A number of edge cases were also fixed along the way: avoiding diagonal movement in tight spaces, handling unreachable cells more gracefully, and protecting against path buffer overflow.
With all this, it is noticeably faster, more clever and performant!
Thanks Mira!
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