Gaming industry has become the fastest growing and most profitable industry. Global industry sales as a whole are expected to rise to $68 billion in 2012. With the growing demand for a more realistic gameplay experience, game artificial intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly important role in the success of games. Pathfinding is one of the fundamental AI problems that most games are confronted with. The biggest challenge to game developers is to provide a practical pathfinding solution in real time under the constraints of memory and CPU resources. The computational effort required to find an optimal path, using current solutions, exponentially increases with size and complexity of the map.
This new proposed method for pathfinding Direction Oriented Pathfinding (DOP) will significantly speed up the pathfinding process and save resources like CPU time and memory space by using the new algorithms without the requirement of post-processing and the new map representations which are easier to generate and maintain. The proposed method DOP, finding
an optimal path in real time, can make games, especially sports games like car racing games, more challenging and game players immersed in the game.