Packing problem revisited

Question

I\'m developing a game and I found a problem that I have to solve to handle the layout of a component which resembles me a packing problem.

To summarize what I need

Answer 1

This 2D Bin Packing problem looks like it's NP hard.

Here are a couple of your options:

• Brute force or better yet branch and bound. Doesn't scale (at all!), but will find you the optimal solution (not in our lifetime maybe).

• Deterministic algorithm: sort the blocks on largest size or largest side and go through that list one by one and assign it the best remaining spot. That will finish very fast, but the solution can be far from optimal (or feasible). Here's a nice picture showing an example what can go wrong. But if you want to keep it simple, that's the way to go.

• Meta-heuristics, starting from the result of a deterministic algorithm. This will give you a very good result in reasonable time, better than what humans come up with. Depending on how much time you give it and the difficulty of the problem it might or might not be the optimal solution. There are a couple of libraries out there, such as Drools Planner (open source java).