What about computing for a number of NPCs when they could finish the new task given the work they already have?

You could use heuristics like distance, or amount of work they already have, or expertise or … to reduce computation time,

Making the game fun with AI and a useful HUD.

The HUD now has helpful elements like health, energy, and game stats.

But I found the debug lines to the ships that were attacking me, actually made the game more enjoyable.  

So I polished that up and made a real HUD system that has the debug lines. …

Rimworld uses a clever algorithm that adds an updatable heat map of undesirability to the movement cost required to enter locations. There's also the boids mechanic for collision avoidance and flocking of multiple moving objects. And They Are Billions manages to put hundreds of mobs on screen witho…

@zviperz , please don't necro. Thread locked.

I created a behavior tree system that is defined completely within c++.  

AI entities have a brain which spins up a behavior tree.

The nodes in the behavior tree are heap allocated, which I believe does have some noticeable performance cost.

The reason for this was to easily use virtual methods a…

LifeAI is an artificial intelligence system that simulates key processes of our minds, such as organizing data into concepts and categories, planning actions based on their predicted outcome, and communication. LifeAI was designed to be simple, but powerful and flexible enough to have many applicat…

Yeah, I can give you some pointers on A* pathfinding.

But in the video you linked, the battlefield is completely open, no fixed obstacles at all. Is that true for the whole game? In that case A* might be overkill, and I would go more for the approach @TheBlackRattle is advocating. So basically make …