from Hacker News

Graph Theory Applications in Video Games

by haywirez on 6/28/25, 10:07 AM with 8 comments

• by j2kun on 7/1/25, 9:08 PM

  > Graph Theory isn't just a topic that is restricted to being "theory". There are several real-life applications of it. One of those just happens to be video games. In this talk, I go over a brief overview of several concepts where Graph Theory is applied.

  There are many places where graph theory is used in real applications, but the topics in this article appear to be hypothetical applications, rather than techniques that video game designers have actually used in their games. At least, the author provides no evidence that they are used and many are explicitly described as things the author thinks people should use.

  That doesn't make the ideas less cool (and bravo to the author for writing about them), just that the title/intro is misleading.

• by Llamamoe on 7/1/25, 8:16 PM

  I can't believe you don't mention graph grammar level generation, as pioneered by Unexplored. It's one of the most fascinating procgen algorithms, too!

• by palmfacehn on 7/2/25, 6:07 AM

  Path finding in a large network of rooms and corridors seems like an obvious use.

• by rudderdev on 7/2/25, 9:40 AM

  Good read. Well written and great visuals, specially for the racetrack example. How did you create those visuals?

• by tantalor on 7/1/25, 5:52 PM

  Aww no mention of planarity :(