The creators of the PathEngine SDK, a toolkit for implementing intelligent agent movement based on 'points of visibility' pathfinding over arbitrary 3D ground meshes, have announced the release of version 5.06.
Key to this latest update is the toolkit's added support for 'tile by tile' construction of individual meshes for PathEngine's existing 'mesh federation' mechanism, which the creators note is useful for pathfinding across sets of discrete but overlapping tile meshes.
Officials add that the toolkit'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 geometry 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.
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 PathEngine toolkit is currently being used in the Asian MMORPG
Granado Espada, as well as Ironlore Entertainment's
Titan Quest and B-Alive's
Wildlife Park 2.
