Video game related. One monday my boss came and asked me to rewrite the pathfinding library recast [1] in ActionScript (we could not use alchemy to compile it f

Video game related. One monday my boss came and asked me to rewrite the pathfinding library recast [1] in ActionScript (we could not use alchemy to compile it from c++ to actionscript because a bug made the AIR compilation to iOS not to finish with any alchemy code in it). His approach was to translate the code by hand without understanding much - a monkey me? He told me I have approx. 1 week. I look at the code and see dozens of optimized c++ code - most of the features wasn't require for us however. I've quickly understood that I would have to figure out the core algorithms and implement them if I wanted to finish on time. The problem was: when you read the code of a complex algorithm in c++, some part can be so complex that you can spend a lot of time just to understand barely how it works. And I have 5 days, 8 hours a day, and the 3D game was waiting. So I took 20 minutes, and succeed to figure out how to make a navmesh-based pathfinding library, on a piece of paper without even reading recast's code. The hard part to figure out is a portal-based algorithm and also to succeed to get error-perfect 3D floating-point geometrical approaches to avoid nasty corner cases which causes bugs on the position of the main avatar of the game. At the end of the week, our 3D game was running with the new library and I did not make more than 1 hours of overtime each day in average. I felt classy =) It has worked during the two years I was there and games has been shipped with it. [1] https://github.com/memononen/recastnavigation https://github.com/memononen/recastnavigation