[evandale]

The pathfinding section reminded me that there's a YouTube steamer, Marcel Vos, who goes into a deep dive of how the pathfinding works.

https://youtu.be/twU1SsFP-bE

He has lots of videos that are deep dives into how RCT works and how things are implemented!

[mmcconnell1618]

I've built a few transportation simulations where I started out with pathfinding methods like A* but the compute cost doesn't scale well with 10,000 or 100,000 agents running around. Pre-computing flow fields for common map destinations is one of those areas where you trade off storage for compute. The agents just look for the signpost telling them "this direction to destination x" instead of actually calculating a path.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A*_search_algorithm#

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zr6ObNVgytk