_{Built with ❤︎ by Xevion}

Paths is a Unity application for watching pathfinding algorithms work. You draw walls, drag the start and end around, pick an algorithm, and it animates the search cell by cell — what it's seen, what it's expanded, and the path it settles on — with a scrubber so you can step through it.

It started as an A* visualizer and grew into a handful of algorithms behind a shared interface, a few heuristics, and an editable grid you can resize and reframe on the fly.

Algorithms

• A* — informed, the original
• Dijkstra — uniform cost, no heuristic
• Greedy best-first — heuristic only, not optimal
• Breadth-first / Depth-first — the uninformed baselines
• Jump Point Search — A* with symmetry-breaking jumps on a uniform grid

A*, Dijkstra and Greedy share an expand loop with a sorted frontier; the heuristic (Manhattan, Euclidean or Chebyshev) and 8-direction movement are toggled in the UI. JPS does its own thing — it's 8-connected by design, so the diagonal toggle doesn't apply to it.

Controls

Space	play / pause
Click + drag	draw / erase walls
Drag green / red	move the start / end
Drag the bar	scrub the search
- / =	shrink / grow the grid
Scroll / right-drag	zoom / pan
H	hide the help overlay

Editing while it's playing recomputes the search and keeps your place in the timeline, so you can watch a wall reshape the path without losing where you were.

Running it

Built and developed on Unity 2020.3.18f1. There's a Makefile for building without opening the editor (point UNITY at your editor binary in a local.mk):

make demo   # build + run the desktop player
make web    # build the WebGL demo and serve it at http://localhost:8000
make test   # EditMode tests

make web produces a self-contained WebGL build under Build/WebGL — it loads off any static host, so dropping that folder somewhere is the whole deploy.

Roadmap

What's done and what's still on the list:

• Algorithms
  • Dijkstra
  • Depth-First Search
  • Breadth-First Search
  • Jump Point Search
  • IDA*
  • Orthogonal Jump Point Search
  • Trace
  • Bellman-Ford
  • D* or D*-Lite
• Configuration Options
  • Search Options
    • Uninformed (BFS / DFS / Dijkstra)
    • Informed (A* / Greedy / JPS)
    • Heuristics
      • Manhattan
      • Euclidean
      • Chebyshev
• Application Elements
  • UI Toolbar / Tool Selection
  • Algorithm Configuration Area
  • Statistics Report
• Miscellaneous
  • Repository graphics