I was wondering what would be the simplest way to make my group of boids pursue my character in a top down 2d game with a path finding algorithm?
I'm thinking I'd have to first find a path to the player with the path finding, get the desired vector and then subtract that from the velocity to get the steering value.
I found "Pursuit and Evasion steering behaviors" on Craig Reynolds' website but I'm not sure if I'm heading in the right direction.
Note that there is a little more detail in a 1999 GDC paper. There are also many open source implementations, such as this (in retrospect, surprisingly complicated) one in OpenSteer.
An agent’s seek behavior simply assumes a desired velocity toward a static target, and defines a “steering force” which is the error/difference between that and its current velocity.
So a pursue behavior requires only to estimate a current target location. A rough approximation is usually good enough, since it is discarded after this animation frame / simulation step. Typically steering behaviors use constant velocity predictions, simply multiplying the current velocity by some time interval. A helpful estimate for that interval is the distance to the quarry agent, divided by our current speed.
How this interacts with (a) the pursuers being a flock, and (b) a simulation based on path finding, would depend on specific details of your game. Probably you want to blend a small pursuit “force” with the flocking behavior so it does not interfere with the nature of the flock.