nice smooth paths

[>flashl!ght<]

That's very nice! you can consider yourself the 1337 actionscipter

Now, while not nearly as elegant as this, I have in the past just used rotation and standard accel/decay formulas for manuvering curves around points... but here is the real issue with 'smooth paths' of any time ive always wondered about:
in a game, say one that uses some node based path finding, when an AI player is going from point to point using 'smooth paths', how do you predict(and adjust to avoid) the fact that in tight areas, overshooting may result in collisions? It might sounds confusing, but what I mean is going through a node at a curve may result in colliding with a wall(unless the corridor happens to perfectly match the curve). This can be especially bad since the AI may get stuck and not be able to proceed to the next node.
The only way I can think of to avoid this is to make 'fat' node paths, then you could easily calculate, based on the players manuevering abilities(rotation speed, max speed, decel, accel) when approaching a node when it will have to slow down, and when it can begin to turn, in order to keep it within the fat paths radius.

But what about when using a formula like the above? I suppose could calculate on the fly the projected path, then check the projected path for collisions, but that seems pretty heavy, and what do you do when a collision is detected?

Maybe this is all overkill for Flash... but it sure is fun to think about