Age of Empires: 25+ years of pathfinding problems with C++ - Raymi Klingers - Meeting C++ 2025

Raymi Klingers discusses the evolution of the Age of Empires pathfinding system, detailing the challenges of upgrading a 1997 C++ codebase.

25+ years of pathfinding problems with C++ - Raymi Klingers - Meeting C++ 2025 Slides: slides.meetingcpp.com Raymi Klingers talks about how pathfinding has been done in games like age of empires in the last 25 years. This talk will be about how a pathfinding system written in C++ in 1997 went through several iterations by different developers over more than 25 years. From a C with classes style codebase with some inline assembly to a 64bit modern C++ code style while staying true to the original gameplay. This unsurprisingly was a bumpy road and issues ranging from simply the loss of knowledge of the algorithms to extended floating point precision being dropped due to a compiler flag which wasn't available anymore in 64bit. We will go over how these issues, after some hefty code archeology, were identified, tackled and solved which hopefully might help out others not fall for the same pitfalls when porting old applications to modern C++