PathEngine has announced the 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 pre-process data structures, and 3D content processing improvements. In addition, the team have also announced a licensing agreement with 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 pre-process 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 including a some small boundary element memory allocations now being replaced by a single compiled data buffer, memory footprint and persistent file size for this boundary data has been very significantly reduced and 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, and 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.

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.

PathEngine is integrated with a host of triple-A titles, including
Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, Stormrise, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Mobile Suit Gundam: Operation Troy, Titan Quest, Florensia and the forthcoming Project NATAL highlight from Lionhead Studios, Milo & Kate. For a more complete list of SDK clients and announced projects please see the official website page: http://www.pathengine.com/. Electronic Theatre will keep you updated with future developments from PathEngine.

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