@teahands @gamedev I think the term you are looking for is 'A-star'.

Godot has build-in A-star algorithm for use which is best for tile-based (or just a lot of pre-defined points like in 2000s FPS) pathfinding, somewhere in scripts.

And it has more fancy navigation which is more for free-flow polygonal world. That is something far more complex than A-star, like 'just use library we have'

@teahands @gamedev

Basic #pathfinding is not hard. What hard is to make it use less resources and calculate as much paths as possible.

I just throw at you some links to study:

* How to implement A*
https://www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/a-star/introduction.html

* How to optimize A* for bigger maps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMBQn_sg7DA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anGdYJu_eH4
https://web.archive.org/web/20190411040123/http://aigamedev.com/open/article/clearance-based-pathfinding/

Posted this from Mastodon basically just to see if it would work, which it does. But also gives me a very small character limit so if the question makes no sense and you need more info, let me know. Expertise very much appreciated!

@teahands @gamedev you probably want to start by looking up A* pathfinding. Essentially it's just a way of calculating the shortest route between two places by scoring each adjacent tile from every other, based on how many hops it took to get there. Same maths however many adjacents you have so it should work for hex quite nicely. I'm 99.9% certain a YouTube search will explain better than I can...

@teahands @gamedev A* ("A star") might be a friendly starting point. It's generally intended for square grids, but a little algebra to get the right distance for the angles might make it possible to extend to hexagons. Even if you don't end up using any part of it, just understanding it might help for fundamentals.