PathEngine Extends 3D Processing to Very Large Worlds, New Licensees
Lyon, France - August 29th 2007 - PathEngine announces release 5.11.00 of the PathEngine pathfinding and agent movement SDK. A tiled 3D content process extends the SDK's powerful existing 3D content processing functionality to worlds of effectively unlimited sized, with the possibility of incremental and parallel per-tile processing for very fast updates after content changes. We're pleased to announce licensing to ArenaNet, Inc. (for 'Guild Wars 2'), to NextPlay Co., Ltd. (for 'Firenze'), and also to yedang online, MAIET entertainment, Inc. and Ani-park, Inc.
PathEngine's tiled 3D content process is based on the application of a horizontal tiling to the existing 3D content processing functionality. The set of source data elements in each tile is processed independantly, with the resulting ground pieces then combined back together for run-time pathfinding.
This ensures that things like process complexity and peak memory load are completely decoupled from overall world complexity, and that total processing times scale essentially linearly with world size.
But the biggest advantage is the possibility for incremental world updates, with processing only required for tiles local to changed content, and with the possibility also for per tile processing to be distributed across threads (to take advantage of multicore CPUs) or even across multiple machines, for the fastest possible update times.
Tiled result pieces can be combined either into a single ground mesh, or into a set of federated overlapping tiles (for use with the SDK's existing 'mesh federation functionality), which then has the effect of also decoupling things like pathfinding preprocess generation and run-time query times from total world size.
Demo applications are included in the PathEngine evaluation SDK, with source code, for tiled 3D content processing with cached per tile results, and also for the construction of federated meshes from tiled ground pieces.
Please see the following page (in the online PathEngine documentation) for more details:
http://www.pathengine.com/Contents/ProgrammersGuide/The3DContentProcessingDemo/page.php
In addition to introducing the tiled 3D process, this release also includes significant optimisations to the existing 3D content process, with big reductions in processing times for most data sets.
Release 5.11.00 also introduces prototype functionality for automatic generation of 'off-mesh connections' as well as a number of important bug-fixes.
A detailed list of all changes made in this (and other) SDK releases can be found in the main SDK change-log:
http://www.pathengine.com/changelog.htm
About PathEngine
PathEngine was founded in 2000 based on experience providing pathfinding and AI to the games industry for more than 10 years.
The PathEngine SDK is built around an advanced implementation of points-of-visibility pathfinding on three-dimensional ground meshes. The approach enables PathEngine to provide both pathfinding and collision in tight integration against a single, sophisticated, agent movement model that takes agent shape into account and seamlessly supports overlapping geometry, with dynamic obstacles directly integrated into this movement model.
PathEngine features in the genre-breaking MMORPG 'Granado Espada' (by IMC Games) (released in the west as 'Sword of the New World'), 'Mobile Suit Gundam: Operation Troy' (by Dimps Corporation), 'Titan Quest' (by Ironlore Entertainment), 'Pirates of the Burning Sea' (by Flying Lab Games) and many other triple-A titles.
For a full list of developers and titles already using the PathEngine SDK please see:
http://www.pathengine.com/clients.php
The SDK includes extensive integration with the 3DS Max and Maya content platforms.
For more information, including documentation and demos, or to arrange an evaluation, please visit:
www.pathengine.com
telephone: +33 4 72.07.81.54
email: generalcontact@pathengine.com