ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at a variation of pathfinding, open goal pathfinding, that can be used to work out both the path and the destination. For pathfinding, each node usually represents a region of the game level, such as a room, a section of corridor, a platform, or a small region of outdoor space. The costs in a pathfinding graph often represent time or distance. The major pathfinding algorithms support the use of a more complex form of graph, the directed graph, which is often useful to developers. Many artificial intelligence developers who actively research pathfinding use the terminology from exposure to the mathematical literature. Where pathfinding in games has one start point and one goal point, the shortest path algorithm is designed to find the shortest routes to everywhere from an initial point. The pathfinding list data structure has a smallest Element method that considers estimated-total-cost rather than cost-so-far but is otherwise the same.
