Sebastian Lague A* Tutorial Series – Threading – Pt. 10

December 16, 2019

A* Tutorial Series

A* Pathfinding (E10: threading)

A* Pathfinding (E10: threading)

Link – Tutorial

By: Sebastian Lague

Intro:

This tutorial gets into the idea of threading to help relieve some of the burden on processing caused by the pathfinding logic. Threading is not something I understand very well, so I will have to look into this more in the future, but I wanted to cover this tutorial just for completions sake.

Tutorial

This setup usese another namespace, the System.Threading namespace. This lets them use the ThreadStart delegate type and the lock keyword. ThreadStart can be assigned the value of some other delegate, with in this case contained the FindPath method from PathfindingHeap. I then looked up the lock keyword here:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-reference/keywords/lock-statement

While this sort of threading setup has some unique syntax, it is an otherwise simple setup. There is a queue of PathResults that are just checked paths that are waiting to be called for the movement of units. The paths get created and checked to make sure they can hit the target, and once this is satisfied, it gets added to the queue.

Summary

I would need to have a better understanding of threading and how to utilize it to assess how useful this tutorial really was. I know the general idea behind it is to help distribute the processing load, but I do not know how well this new setup accomplishes that.