Rooms, glorious rooms

One of the improvements made to the engine was with path finding. The interestingly colourful, above image shows the result of the changes made.

It shows the grey of the new colour scheme for the test world (the game's going to be set in South America making a test colour of radioactive sand fairly useless) and the upgraded pathfinder code showing different "rooms".

These rooms (each a different shade of blue) are built from the current pathfinder grid, and allow the pathfinder calculations to be focussed on a much smaller amount of data. A search now will first search the rooms lists. This is to calculate an approximate quickest room from A to B. After the room route has been calculated, the path through the rooms from the entry point to the exit point is worked out.

This means on long journeys, the pathfinder options are limited to the room, instead of the entire world, which means exponentially quicker calculations. The large squares visible in the image above are where one room connects to another.

Because I'm also choosing to store the pathfinder data once it's been calculated, there was a nice, large rewrite of how files are saved and loaded which should hopefully come in handy later on.