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[BorisTheBrave]

1) Unit's can pass through each other.
2) Intersecting units apply a "discomfort" to each other, and push away.  This is similar to a spring-based physics simulation.
3) Moving units have higher "push" priority, causing lanes to briefly form for a unit that is barreling through a crowd.

I don't think this is what Starcraft II is using - too easy to bug out, or abuse in pro competitions. It's a high spec game, and not known for having enormous amounts of units, so I would expect a significant amount of AI pathfinding and planning routes. Navigational mesh is useless when players are plonking down buildings everywhere, often deliberately to confound the pathfinding.

[digitalgibs]

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply SC2 was using navigation meshes; I only meant that I might be able to use it for my own stuff.  

But I do think that SC2 is allowing units from the same "team" to pass through each other, then using a series of grid-based spring operations to fan them out.  The video link shown earlier in this thread pretty much shows exactly that.  Of course I don't expect enemy units to pass through each other since body-blocking is a common tactic in Blizzard RTS games.

The reason they can pass through each other is because the simulation is updating their "comfort" at 60fps.  It's the same reason you can't see a physics object penetrate a wall or ground (most of the time).  It does penetrate surfaces constantly, but it's correcting itself at 60-100fps so you hardly ever notice until the physics simulation wigs out.

EDIT: Here's the video I was talking about

[BorisTheBrave]

Meh, could be. The way they for an increasingly large circle when they are all destined for one waypoint seems a strong point in your favour. But I don't see any compression in areas of high "pressure", so I'm not sure it's springs.

[Pencerkoff]

Hello this is Pencerkoff

Developed my own little engine in Game Maker using a Flowfield approach modeled somewhat on this link someone posted.

(see this)

My engine seems to really lose it when you break 100 units, but you can try it out if you like.  It's a 2.2 Mb .exe file.

http://www.mediafire.com/?tfhruomte2j

-PENCERKOFF