PathEngine Announces SDK Release 5.04
Lyon, France - September 14th 2006 - PathEngine announces the immediate availability of release 5.04 of the PathEngine pathfinding and agent movement SDK. This releases adds robust built-in support for building and pathfinding against 'federations' of overlapping pathfinding meshes, for seamless pathfinding over environments of effectively unlimited size.
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 following page (in the PathEngine online documentation) provides an overview of this feature:
http://www.pathengine.com/Contents/ProgrammersGuide/WorldRepresentation/MeshFederations/page.php
Release 5.04 also extends PathEngine's curved path generation to take a desired agent end direction into account, if desired.
An SDK change log, with details of these and other changes, can be found on the following page:
http://www.pathengine.com/changelog.htm
About PathEngine
PathEngine was founded in 2000 based on experience providing pathfinding and AI to the games industry over 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', which is causing a hell of a stir amongst Asian players, 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 already using the PathEngine SDK 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 72.87.03.36
email: generalcontact@pathengine.com