How Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun Solved Pathfinding | War Stories | Ars Technica on HackerTube: recommended by 2 Hacker News commenters across 2 separate months, 2020–2026.
interview · evergreen
Westwood Studios co-founder Louis Castle talks about how pathfinding was solved in Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, in an Ars Technica War Stories episode. It also touches on other challenges in Westwood's RTS games.
HN commenters recommend it as an accessible, non-technical look at real game pathfinding problems from a developer who built them.
“Ars Technica had a series of 10 minute videos where they interviewed developers about technical challenges.”
4 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
You're probably looking for something more detailed and implementation-focused, but Ars Technica had a series of 10 minute videos where they interviewed developers about technical challenges. E.g. they had one on pathfinding and CD video in second generation Westwood RTS games [1] [1] ▶ this video
in “The year of peak might and magic” · View on HN
With regard to pathfinding, there is this great video on some of their challenges at the time [1]. 1. ▶ this video
in “EA will be releasing the C&C Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert source code under GPL3” · View on HN
see also: "How Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun Solved Pathfinding" (2019, non-technical, for a general audience) ▶ this video
in “Age of Empires: 25 years of pathfinding problems with C++ [video]” · View on HN
Tangentially related, sometimes making a bot do mistakes is harder than making a correct bot.See Command and Conquer's pathfinding anecdote: ▶ this video
in “Now that machines can learn, can they unlearn?” · View on HN