> it seems to me that A* only works on tile-based games. > What if my game isn't tile-based?
A* works on 'nodes', where a node is just some location defined in the game space. Tile-based games have a very obvious node structure to them, and so A* is very easily adapted to them. But, really, there's not necessarily a lot of difference between applying A* to a tile-based game on the one hand and a network of location-nodes in a 3d space on the other.
