PathEngine
Version 5.21.00 attained; Monolith and Nexon signed up.
Lyon, France - August 7th 2009 - PathEngine announces release 5.21.00 of their pathfinding and agent movement SDK, with key features of the release being the addition of functionality for projecting 3D geometry to ground shapes, significant optimisation of preprocess data structures, and 3D content processing improvements. We're also very pleased to announce licensing to Monolith, and to Nexon for 'Nexon Star'.
Ground shape projection works on 3D tri-mesh input data, with this mesh data effectively clipped to a specified agent movement space above the ground, and a convex hull thrown around the resulting set of clipped points. This is something that can be done at run-time as well as at content time, and the objects created in this way can be treated just like other PathEngine obstructions (e.g. 'burnt-in' to a mesh, included in a semi-dynamic obstacles setup, or switched in and out of collision contexts as completely dynamic obstacles).
The preprocess data structure optimisation is essentially the replacement of a linked element boundary representation by the 'compiled' representation implemented previously for the SPU collision core (which has been significantly fleshed out), with some advantages being:
A bunch of small boundary element memory allocations are now replaced by a single compiled data buffer. Memory footprint and persistent file size for this boundary data are very significantly reduced. Save and load times see the most significant improvement, since per element save logic is now replaced by essentially just one single buffer read/write.There are also a number of other optimisations in this release, with some big speedups in particular for point collision testing.
3D content processing improvements include:
More intelligent vertical range management for voxel processing, with significantly increased effective vertical range, in particular, in the case of tile by tile processing setups. Support for 3D processing on x64.There are also a number of other API changes, and some bug fixes. For full details please refer to the SDK changelog:
http://www.pathengine.com/changelog.htm
-- About PathEngine --
PathEngine was founded in 2000 to provide an extremely focused and modular solution to some fundamental issues in intelligent agent movement, based on hard industry experience.
The SDK is built around an advanced implementation of points-of-visibility pathfinding over three-dimensional ground meshes.
Our approach enables pathfinding and collision in tight integration against a single, sophisticated, agent movement model, with agent shape taken into account exactly, seamless support for overlapping geometry, and with fast and robust dynamic obstacles directly integrated into the core movement model.
PathEngine is integrated with a host of triple-A titles, including
'Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts' (Rare, Microsoft Corporation), 'Stormrise'
(The Creative Assembly), 'Pirates of the Burning Sea' (Flying Lab Games), 'Mobile Suit Gundam: Operation Troy' (Dimps Corporation), 'Titan Quest' (Ironlore Entertainment), 'Florensia' (NetTimeSoft Corporation), and many more.
For a more complete list of SDK clients and announced projects please see:
http://www.pathengine.com/clients.php
For further information, including documentation and demos, or to arrange an evaluation, please visit:
www.pathengine.com
telephone: +33 4 72.07.81.54
email: generalcontact@pathengine.com