Raycasting instead of A* based Pathfinding and Collision?

[madmuffin]

I want to clone what this Russian guy achieved for my game exactly but the programmer says that its not physically possible to do anything other than A* based grid movement. It's incredibly frustrating because I've seen Atari games where entities on screen can pathfind around without the need of a grid but still colliding with each other and respecting collisions with the grid, and he hasn't been able to explain to me what's so hard about pathfinding that isn't A* based because I've seen a thousand games that do it before us no problem at all. 

Like, how do you program pathfinding and collision like THIS?

[tips4design]

This question is very broad. You can just google path-finding algorithms and you'll find tons of them.

[lewster32]

This kind of pathfinding is more correctly described as 'flow field' or 'vector field' pathfinding. Here is a good explanation: http://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/tutorials/understanding-goal-based-vector-field-pathfinding--gamedev-9007