4 hours ago, IADaveMark said:

So no one read my post on JPS+? That's the standard way for not only allowing any angle movement but reducing the complexity of the search space so that your pathing calls are faster to begin with. Seriously... watch the vid with Steve Rabin.

I watched the video you posted but did not see any mention of any-angle pathing.  However I could see how it might be extended it to any angle pathfinding if you allowed more than 8 jump links per node. (i.e. links to all visible intersection/corner nodes).  I looked at the source code and I don't see anything about any-angle support.  Do you have a specific spot where an any-angle implementation is mentioned?

Or did the example he gave in the video just happen to align with 8-direction, and the four diagonals are actually allowed to be any diagonal direction?

Something to mention is that Jump Point Search only works on Uniform cost grids.  So if you have mud tiles that cost more to traverse than road tiles, or whatever, it won't work.

With string pulling what about this problem:

I pathfind first. The path it finds prefers road and avoids forest and swamp. But when i start string pulling the found path it will not take terrain cost into consideration. It will find a walkable shorter line shortcutting diagonally over the swamp but it might be slower if the terrain is slower. Right? 

3 hours ago, suliman said:

I pathfind first. The path it finds prefers road and avoids forest and swamp. But when i start string pulling the found path it will not take terrain cost into consideration. It will find a walkable shorter line shortcutting diagonally over the swamp but it might be slower if the terrain is slower. Right?

Yes. You should verify that the cost does not increase when you change the path.

I never did stringpulling, but since you know the exact old and new path (I assume), you can easily calculate costs, and they should be equal. (If the new path has higher cost, it's a worse path. If it is lower, your pathfinding is broken.)

But the whole point is that I pathfind on a strict gridbased map, and when I string pull I remove nodes so that there is still a walkable path, even though that walking will not be strictly ON nodes (i will cut over the nodes in various angles making walking look less rigid).

When units walk they check the walking speed from whatever node is under them right now. You mean I should do this ("walk" along the new path by incrementing position and check the total travel time) when stringpulling and only remove a node if the new "path" will be faster? (the walking cost CAN and should be lower since the pathfinding only finds paths using "whole nodes" and with stringpulling I will find "other paths" See the pic i posted in the first post.).

Hmm, I am not sure you should compute the cost of the new path in a different way than you did previously in the grid-based pathfinding stage. It may create all kinds of subtle changes in costs if you do it wrong. (Eg since your new path is subtly cheaper, code may pull the string a bit into the swamp, right until all your cost reduction has been eaten by the swamp.)

A somewhat safer method is to still use the grid-based costs, but use the new path to decide which grid-elements you visit.

But if the path is not going strictly across the middle of the nodes in the grid (which is the entire point of this thread) I must use that method right? It's still based on the cost for each tile (the tile has a terrain-type, which translates to a movement cost)

String-pulling/funnel systems assume that there is no difference in the passability or quality of a path between the 2 points in question. This isn't the case for you, so you can't use it. (You didn't mention movement costs in the first post.)

Obviously you can't easily compare grid-based movement with continuous movement. The path you find across a grid is based on the assumption that you follow the grid. If you're not following the grid then you're not using the path!

It's not even practical to hack this; a naive approach might be to examine the string-pulled path and see how fast it is compared to the regular path, but you'll have to calculate how much of the path crosses each square, consider whether the unit can fit there based on adjacent blocked tiles, etc.