PathEngine Updates SDK, New MMO Licensing Agreements

PathEngine announced the release of a 5.26 update for its pathfinding and agent movement SDK, as well as new licensing agreements with NCSoft, Nexon, N. Dolphin Soft, and Bigpoint. The company's SDK is built on an implementation of "points-of-visibility pathfinding over three-dimensional ground meshes". It's designed to enable pathfinding and collision in integration against a single agent movement model, taking into account agent shape and supporting overlapping geometry. PathEngine's 5.26 update essentially merges code from the SDK's forthcoming version 6 release back into the 5.xx line. The company says it offers an enhanced "paradigm for generation of agent unobstructed space", promising speedups for preprocess generation. 5.26 also features changes to the SDK's base ground mesh representation meant to reduce ground mesh load times and memory footprints on ground mesh load. PathEngine notes that the update adds reductions in position resolution and other ground mesh related query times, too. NCSoft has licensed PathEngine for its upcoming martial arts MMORPG Blade & Soul, while Nexon has implemented it in its Mabinogi series. N. Dolphin Soft's project isn't named, but MGame is using PathEngine in its Warbane MMO, and Bigpoint is working with the SDK for Drakensang Online. Previous titles that have integrated PathEngine's SDK include Rare's Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, Flying Lab Games' Pirates of the Burning Sea, Ironlore Entertainment's Titan Quest, The Creative Assembly's Stormrise, and many other games.