Hello!
I'm the developer of this game. Thanks very much for your interest and discussion here :)
I'm starting to feel like I didn't go into enough detail with my post, since there's a lot I could talk about and also a lot I could benchmark to give you some actual numbers on performance. But maybe I'll leave that for a different post in the future.
The game I'm developing is a commercial project, so it would be silly to be on the front page of HN and not try to direct people towards the commercial side of things. Here is the link to the game's steam page, you can wishlist and maybe buy the game when it's released so I can afford living expenses and expensive coffee beans: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3656660/Deep_Space_Exploi...
Thank you! :)
You may want to look into improvements to A* for grids, like Rectangular Symmetry Reduction.
Also jump point search: https://zerowidth.com/2013/a-visual-explanation-of-jump-poin...
If just use A*, but you rank open to loop for lowest (f, h) pairs, then the search frontier just dives despite having multiple optimal paths, as the new node tie-breaking ensures we prefer nodes that seem closest to the goal.
afaik jump point search would work for uniform cost grids but not if there's the exponential term that OP has
This is a cool concept. How long have you been working on it? And do you have a rough idea of when you'll release it?
Thank you! At the moment, about 7 months (I originally thought it would take 4-6 months haha). I'm really hoping to release it in the next couple of months, but my ability to estimate these things is obviously lacking.
You're being consistent and that's the most important thing. I hope we see it again here once it's complete. Good luck!