A* First Test

So i started playing around, trying to implement A* into haxegui (AStar is a shortest-path finding algorithm, look here for probably the easiest tutorial about it), the good news are that sitnarf already wrote aPath is its easily imported and very generic, just give it a grid, mark the nodes and you're good to go. Bad news are that the benchmarks don't look that good, see the video below.

The drawing code does slow things down, but i had to visualize it somehow :) Here's a snippet, all this is done before the path calculation:

var container = this.getParentContainer();
container.redraw();

var s = Haxegui.gridSpacing;
var hs = s>>1;

var w = (container.box.width/s);
var h = (container.box.height/s);

var engine = new aPath.Engine();
engine.generateMap(w,h);

for(i in 0...w)
 for(j in 0...h) {
   // get top-most object
   var o = container.getObjectsUnderPoint(new flash.geom.Point(hs+i*s, hs+j*s)).pop();

   // mark it unwalkable if its a widget
   if(o!=container && !Std.is(o, toys.Socket) ) {
container.graphics.beginFill(Color.BLUE, .5);
container.graphics.drawRect(i*s, j*s, s, s);
container.graphics.endFill();

engine.map[i][j].close = true;
    }
   ...
   ...

Seen on the video, a 10x10px grid takes more than 3.5sec to be marked (this includes drawing "unwalkable" blue tiles, which is expensive, it takes about 0.55sec without, still not fast enough) I guess the most expensive is the getObjectsUnderPoint() but i'll need better profiling to be sure... The next step would be to get the target node, before doing all this, so i could minimize the gridded area to be checked. Any A*\haXe tips and optimizations will be more than welcome, have a great weekend!