Despite lack of activity here I have been very busy programming cool stuff which I hope to get around documenting and sharing with you all.

I need to implement the A* algorythm for one of my projects. Its a fairly common to speed up of the implemention to use a binary heap for the open list because of its O(log(n)) insertion and O(1) removal properties.  As I code it up I thought it would be nice to share my binary heap implementation, something which can be a bit fiddly to get right in practice.  I wrote a little fuzz tester to nuke it, so that I can be fairly sure it works correctly.

Gist: BinaryHeap

I chose to make the size fixed at compile time for simplicity, and becaues I am happy to terminate a pathfinding search that exceeds a fixed open list size, as old school games used to do.  It should however not require much work at all to grow the heap size when a node is pushed when currently at full capacity.

I will also leave you with this picture from my latest project: