So you want to build a train game huh?  With trains and tracks and pathfinding. How do you model it?

So as part of a simple train puzzle video game I was building, I had a need to extrude a polygon along a line: specifically, I needed to extrude a “rail” shape along a path: Extruded rail polygon However, I had never worked with hand-constructing polygons before; Godot did not have functionality to do this…

This post is about the interesting ways I optimized my pathfinding algorithm – from 400ms for an average path to around 30ms – a 10x improvement. The decision making process on how I got to this improvement was pretty interesting, and required some insights into how programming languages work. So let’s dive in. So, in…