Age of Empires: 25 years of pathfinding problems with C++ [video]

Excellent talk!

I don't really play AoE2 anymore (though I have bought it!), but I can feel the excitement and dedication the author seems to put into his work. I'm sure modern AoE2 players have benefited immensely from it! :)

Rediscovered this game a year ago, and am absolutely loving it.

The r/aoe2 community is also generally welcoming and helpful.

A very nice video. It shows that computer games are glamorous on the outside, but once you look behind the scenes, they just look like normal software. I was also surprised to hear that the team did not only rely on computer graphics textbook algorithms, but built their own pathfinding algorithm in a pragmatic manner.

The Age of Empires 3 path finding was so impressive, but also with cavalry it got clumpy and could be used tactically (which is sort of realistic)

see also: "How Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun Solved Pathfinding" (2019, non-technical, for a general audience) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-VAL7Epn3o

Wait, is the AoE source code public?

It's good to get understanding and confirmation that, yes, the community userpatch version on the online matchmaking service voobly before Microsoft came back in an recapitalized on the popularity by releasing Definitive Edition was and remains the best version in some very important ways. Also great to hear DE has now reached near parity with lower resource use.