In the last couple of days I have made good progress with pathfinding. It still has some rough edges, but it’s almost good enough for the first release.
As usual, when there’s something new and cool, there’s a (lengthy) video: http://youtu.be/ZaO8gDLwZeM
A full pathfind, in a complex environment on a slow phone, may take as much as 150ms. This of course happens on a separate thread, but if your phone is single-core, this thread will share the CPU with all the others. That means the game would slow down a bit for short periods while the animals are pathfinding.
To combat this, I made the AI to use pathfinding as little as possible. With this on, I hope the slowdowns will not be noticeable. If they are, there’s always room for optimizations and tweaking. We’ll see.
