I have been trying to design a good path finding algorithm that will support a large number of agents by default. A* is not very good at supporting more then once agent at a time, where their paths may intersect, and can require lots of fudges to get it to work correctly in these situations.  Also when A* is implemented over a grid based world, it can require additional processing to produce non grid aligned paths (path smoothing).

For this demo, I threw A* out of the window and took a potential field approach.  I used bi-linear interpolation when sampling the potential field so that each agent wouldn’t have to be grid aligned. The results are really cool, and I can simulate upward of 1000 agents without any performance hit. Perfect for a nice hack and slash dungeon crawler.