PathEngine, a supplier of a pathfinding and agent movement SDK, announced today the release of 5.04 of the PathEngine SDK. This releases adds built-in support for building and pathfinding against 'federations' of overlapping pathfinding meshes, for seamless pathfinding over environments of effectively unlimited size.
The company notes that the technique can be used, also, with environments of moderate complexity, to improve performance, or trade-off performance and memory footprint. The API supports applications loading tile meshes on demand or even distributing pathfinding across machines in a server network.
Federated pathfinding has previously been provided by PathEngine in the form of custom content tools and application side code, and this technique is already being used by some big name MMO developers, with impressive results. This release makes some significant improvements in the core technique, brings the technique into the main PathEngine distribution, and adds documentation and an example project to demonstrate the feature.
The PathEngine SDK is built around an 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 agent movement model that takes agent shape into account and supports overlapping geometry, with dynamic obstacles directly integrated into this movement model. The tool is being used within the PathEngine is being used in the Asian MMORPG
Granado Espada, as well as Ironlore Entertainment's
Titan Quest and B-Alive's
Wildlife Park 2.
For more information about the SDK, including demos and documentation, or to request a commercial evaluation visit the
company website.
