PathEngine SDK Adds 'Polygon Soup' Content Process, New Licensees
Lyon, France - November 27th 2006 - PathEngine announces release 5.05.00 of the PathEngine pathfinding and agent movement SDK. This release adds support for robust generation of pathfinding ground meshes directly from un-marked-up 3D scene representations, including arbitrary polygon soups. We're also very happy to announce licensing of the SDK to Avalanche Studios, in Sweden, (developers of 'Just Cause'), for a yet to be announced title on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3, and to G10 Entertainment, in South Korea.
PathEngine uses a pathfinding architecture based on pathfinding and collision in tight integration against an explicit world representation and extremely well specified agent movement model.
This approach has big advantages when it comes to understanding exactly what's going on at run-time, with the resulting movement easy to understand, and with the possibility to examine pathfinding world representation 'under a microscope'. But, traditionally, this kind of approach has required at least some manual markup generation, which can present a barrier to integration.
The new content process generates exactly the same explicit world representation as PathEngine's existing content process but without the need for any explicit scene markup, effectively providing the best of both worlds.
PathEngine's existing 2D content process will continue to be provided in parallel with the new content process, with the possibility to mix and match the two processes, if desired.
A demo of the new content processing is available, as part of the (publically accessible) 'testbed only' version of the PathEngine SDK.
Some information about this demo can be found here (in the PathEngine online documentation):
http://www.pathengine.com/Contents/ProgrammersGuide/The3DContentProcessingDemo/page.php
With more detailed reference for the new content process also available, here:
http://www.pathengine.com/Contents/ProgrammersGuide/WorldRepresentation/3DContentProcessing/page.php
A detailed list of all changes made in this release can be found on the 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.
The SDK includes extensive integration with the 3DS Max and Maya content platforms.
PathEngine is being used in the genre-breaking MMORPG 'Granado Espada' and features in the recently released 'Titan Quest' (by Ironlore Entertainment) and 'Wildlife Park 2' (by B-Alive).
For a more complete list of developers and titles already using the PathEngine SDK please see:
http://www.pathengine.com/clients.php
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