PathEngine SDK adds scalable data generation for very large worlds.
Lyon, France - December 18th 2006 - PathEngine announces release 5.06.00 of the PathEngine pathfinding and agent movement SDK. This release adds support for 'tile by tile' construction of individual meshes for PathEngine's existing 'mesh federation' mechanism (for pathfinding across sets of discrete but overlapping tile meshes). Meshes constructed in this way are completely independant, with only local meshes needing to be updated afterworld modifications, and with the possibility for pathfinding over partially generated federations where very fast feedback is desired.
PathEngine's mesh federation functionality is essentially a way of splitting a very large world into chunks, while at the same time guaranteeing seamless pathfinding across the boundaries between these chunks, and without constraints on the way geomtery is placed with respect to the chunk boundaries. These chunks (or 'federated tile meshes') can then be streamed in as required, as a player moves through the world, or distributed across servers to manage very large numbers of pathfinding agents, in the case of massively multiplayer online games.
General documentation for PathEngine's mesh federations functionality can be found here (in the PathEngine online documentation): http://www.pathengine.com/Contents/ProgrammersGuide/WorldRepresentation/MeshFederations/page.php
An example project to demonstrate this feature in action is (publically) available as part of the 'testbed only' version of the PathEngine SDK, with some information about this example project here: http://www.pathengine.com/Contents/ProgrammersGuide/ExampleProjects/'meshfederation'/page.php
Information about the new 'tile by tile' approach to federation construction can then be found on the following page: http://www.pathengine.com/Contents/ProgrammersGuide/WorldRepresentation/ConstructingMeshFederations/page.php
A detailed list of all changes made in this release can be found in 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