How do I calculate nearest object pathfinding?

I have been playing around with resource collecting ai, check out the following example.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ejo9hek1eucof ... .capx?dl=0

The men will find a path to the nearest wood and base but they don't take the walls into account and find the nearest based on a straight line. Is there a simple way to the calculate the length of a path for each target then pick the shortest before moving along it?

guess it's pretty difficult then

guess it's pretty difficult then

bump

You could just rerun pathfinding on an interval.

that's awesome, thanks for your time. is there any drawbacks from using this method?

If you have too many running at the same time, then things might slow down. Just keep an eye on performance

and test as widely as possible, which you should be doing anyway.

Another interesting idea would be to use

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithm

The idea is to use an array to store the direction to move for every spot to get to the target with the shortest distance. It's just as easy to have more than one target so it's good for many objects that need to find a path to the same set of targets.

So after the array is calculated objects can move to the closest target by just referencing the direction of the square it's currently on.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/542 ... eSpot.capx

In the example I made the objects accelerate toward the direction instead of just setting the direction. The result was nice rounded turning.

It caused a stall if I calculated the array all at once, so I adjusted it to only calculate a bit at a time.

awesome, thanks for your advice, i'll give the wiki a read