   Vector Field pathfinding, a little help please
  for a third year project in uni i am planning on looking into vector fields as a tool for pathfinding. i believe that Supreme commander 2 recently employed a similar techneque which they have called flow field.i have been doing some research on this topic and i was just wondering if there are any sources anyone on here would recommend me looking at or if there is another linked topic i could look into for more informationany help would be great thanks   
  There are a few flow field articles in the AI Game Programming Wisdom books if you have access to those.   ;  ah great thank you. Though sadly my uni doesn't have them heh seems i may have picked a difficult subject here as i seem to be unable to find no information about vector fields in regards to pathfinding in games =/ one of the main things i want to find out is if they are used in conjunction to A* or if they are a replacement for it   ;  Path-finding can be reduced to following the direction indicated by the gradient of the distance function. Is there much more to be said about this?   ;Quote:Original post by nataku17Though sadly my uni doesn't have themYour university has access to virtually every book in the world. Familiarize yourself with your university library's interlibrary loan service... it is one of the most valuable benefits of being a student.   ;  Sigh.Is this what you are talking about?Steering BehaviorsSpecifically:Flow Field FollowingReynolds' research for this goes back a few decades.   ;Quote:Original post by alvaroPath-finding can be reduced to following the direction indicated by the gradient of the distance function. Is there much more to be said about this?This distance function is also known as the Bellman Value Function for the min-time pathfinding problem.  It can be computed efficiently using the brushfire algorithm; if you google this you'll find info.You may also want to see e.g. this which gives a quick overview of potential field methods.  (The vector field used in these methods is the negative gradient of a potential function.)   