How Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun Solved Pathfinding | War Stories | Ars Technica
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters recommend it as an accessible, non-technical look at real game pathfinding problems from a developer who built them.
What it is
Westwood Studios co-founder Louis Castle talks about how pathfinding was solved in Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, in an Ars Technica War Stories episode. It also touches on other challenges in Westwood's RTS games.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2020 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Recommends imjasonmiller · 2020-05 · on “EA will be releasing the C&C Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert source code under GPL3”
With regard to pathfinding, there is this great video on some of their challenges at the time [1]. 1. [this video]
Recommends saithound · 2025-07 · on “The year of peak might and magic”
You're probably looking for something more detailed and implementation-focused, but Ars Technica had a series of 10 minute videos where they interviewed developers about technical challenges. E.g. they had one on pathfinding and CD video in second generation Westwood RTS games [1] [1] [this video]
Cites huachimingo · 2021-08 · on “Now that machines can learn, can they unlearn?”
Tangentially related, sometimes making a bot do mistakes is harder than making a correct bot.See Command and Conquer's pathfinding anecdote: [this video]
Cites shoo · 2026-02 · on “Age of Empires: 25 years of pathfinding problems with C++ [video]”
see also: "How Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun Solved Pathfinding" (2019, non-technical, for a general audience) [this video]