Pathfinding analyzer

A early version of my pathfinder application tool. It implements:

  • DFS (just to show how bad it is at finding paths)
  • Breadh-First-Search
  • Dijkstra
  • And mainly A*.

(will add Best-First-Search soon)

Really useful for those who want to see the difference between some heuristics, and the resulting paths, in A*.

http://www.private.is/arni/pathfinding/app.gif

http://www.private.is/arni/pathfinding/app2.gif

Download: http://www.private.is/arni/pathfinding/Pathfinder.zip

(Sorry, no Jar/webstart yet… still working on this. And only for Java 6, sorry again.)

Let me know if you find something that is flawed.

Few things you can do in that application:

  • You can resize the grid by using arrow keys (WARNING, don’t exceed 256x256…starts to lag)
  • You can toggle on/off the gridlines using G
  • You can move grid grid using W,A,S,D (buggy though)
  • You can zoom in/out using + and - on the numkeypad.
  • You can change the heuristics by pressing 1-5 on the qwerty-keypad (only in A*)
  • You can press SPACEBAR to show how the nodes were traversed (pink show paths tried, fading to black means not tried as much)
  • You can reset the view of the grid by pressing R.
  • Press enter to relocate the start and goal nodes (sorry, you can’t manually position them yet!)
  • Press F5 to refresh the pathfinding operation… nice to do a few times to see the timer.

- If you want to view a randomized map, press M and resize the grid using the arrow keys.

A very usefull demo, for visualizsing the algorithms.

possibly it is beyond awesome. ;D