Yes, though I didn't know the proper name for it until now.

I knew it wasn't a novel technique (it's too basic for that), but had not seen it discussed before on HN, so I thought I'd share my experiences.

Edit: Reading the linked article, their particular algorithm is not incremental, and not breadth first, which in my view leaves a lot of value I was talking about above on the table.

It also uses a list lookup when marking the tiles - please don't do this in real world code! Though it was probably to simplify the blog post code.

Another good article about flow field pathfinding: http://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/tutorials/understanding-...

Nice demo video and intro here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bspb9g9nTto