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sdwryesterday at 3:43 PM1 replyview on HN

The perfect information version calculates the path once on click, the local version needs to recalculate every time the unit moves (and new tiles are "seen")


Replies

daymanstepyesterday at 6:59 PM

Recalculating the path every game tick is too expensive. What brood war did was to just have units wait for a second when they collide with something before recalculating the path. This resulted in horrendous "traffic jams".

It's also why Brood War players got into the habit of spam-clicking, because the game would recompute paths every time you issued a command, so spam-clicking resulted in smoother movement.