ABSTRACT
Jump point search (JPS) is a devised optimal pathfinding algorithm that can speed up searches on uniform cost grid maps by up to an order of magnitude over traditional A*. Both JPS and JPS+ use a state-space pruning strategy that only works for grid search spaces where the cost of traversal is uniform with regard to distance. This chapter explains in detail how JPS+ works and the exact specifics on how to implement it. The genius of the preprocessed map is that it contains many of the decisions required for the search, thus making the runtime code much simpler and faster than traditional JPS. JPS+ takes a great deal of the runtime computation from JPS and stores it directly in the map. As a result, the algorithm is up to an order of magnitude faster than traditional JPS and two orders of magnitude faster than a highly optimized A*.
