Hey

I am currently in the progress of making a 2D grid based game. What I am attempting to do, is to place a character within a certain grid and move towards the grid cell that is the near object, e.g. a tree.

I can make it so it does work, but it would require too many lines of code (well I think so) as my grid is 40 by 30 cells. The image below shows my current thinking:

What I would really like is a small (in terms of lines) algorithm that is capable of checking every cell within the 40 by 30 grid, if needed. I could just check each cell in sequence, but I would like to expand from the origin (by that I mean the characters position).

Any help is greatly appreciated, thank you.

I'm not sure if you're looking for something more than this, but what I'd planned on doing is like so...

int SpacialCubeSize = 10;

Objects[] Space = new Objects[x, y, z] 

Objects Player_Object;

int offset;

Space[(int)(Player_Object.Player_Pos.x / SpacialCubeSize)+offset, (int)(Player_Object.Player_Pos.y / SpacialCubeSize)+offset, (int)(Player_Object.Player_Pos.z / SpacialCubSize)+offset] = Player_Object;

If you're talking about placing a character and a tree on a 40x30 grid, and having the player move to the tree, then you'll likely want Dijkstra's or an A* algorithm, neither of which is very small.

Unless you cheat by placing them in the same 2 spots everytime, which means you can pre-define the path.

If you're not talking about path-finding then forget everything I just said. :)

Is the problem this?

1) Find the tree that is closest to the character

2) Move to that tree

If trees are rare, and cells are plentiful, then it's probably easier to keep a separate list of each tree, together with which cell it is in. Then run through all the trees, calculating the distance between the player and the trees, and remembering which tree is closest. At the end, you know which tree you want to move towards, which should give you the direction to move.

You do not need Dijkstra or A*, because the cost of examining a square is very small, and you don't know which square is actually the goal -- A* works great when you know the goal, but your problem is finding the goal.

If you can't keep a list of trees, then examine each of the grid cells, and if the cell has a tree, calculate distance from cell to player, and if closer than the previously closest cell, then remember that cell. When done, you will be remembering the closest tree cell, which is the cell you want to walk towards. Examining 1200 cells (40x30) really doesn't take any noticeable time on a modern CPU; at least as long as you only do it once in a while.