PathEngine Announces SDK Release 5.10, New Licensees

News by GamesIndustry.biz Contributor

Published on May 10, 2007

Lyon, France - May 10th 2007 - PathEngine announces release 5.10.of the PathEngine pathfinding and agent movement SDK, featuring a new graph search core and very significant performance improvements for pathfinding around completely dynamic obstacles. We're also pleased to announce licensing of the SDK to The Creative Assembly, creators of the Total War series, for a yet to be announced title on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3, and to 3d-io, as well as academic licensing to Dongguk University, in Korea.

The new search core improves the performance for pathfinding queries across the board, but with the most significant benefits for queries against dynamic obstacles, where this really changes the fundamental performance characteristics of the search and how search times scale as dynamic obstacles are added.

The new code builds on PathEngine's existing fast dynamic collision framework to intelligently detect obstacles that are relevant to a search whilst the search is in progress, with only those obstacles then attached to the search graph.

Some additional query benchmarks have been added to the SDK benchmark example project, with information about running this benchmark on the following page:

http://www.pathengine.com/runningthebenchmark.php

And results on:

http://www.pathengine.com/benchmarks.php

There are also a number of important bugfixes in this release, as well as a move to Visual Studio 2005 (as standard compilation platform on Windows based platforms) and to DirectX 9 for the TestBed.

A detailed list of all changes made in this (and other) SDK releases can be found in the 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.

PathEngine features in the genre-breaking MMORPG 'Granado Espada' (by IMC Games), 'Mobile Suit Gundam: Operation Troy' (by Dimps Corporation), 'Titan Quest' (by Ironlore Entertainment), 'Pirates of the Burning Sea' (by Flying Lab Games) and many other triple-A titles.

For a full list of developers and titles already using the PathEngine SDK please see:

http://www.pathengine.com/clients.php

The SDK includes extensive integration with the 3DS Max and Maya content platforms.

For more information, including documentation and demos, or to arrange an evaluation, please visit: