PathEngine Extends 3D Processing to Very Large Worlds

[Tami]

PathEngine Extends 3D Processing to Very Large Worlds, New Licensees

Lyon, France – August 29th 2007 – PathEngine announces release 5.11.00 of the PathEngine pathfinding and agent movement SDK. A tiled 3D content process extends the SDK's powerful existing 3D content processing functionality to worlds of effectively unlimited sized, with the possibility of incremental and parallel per-tile processing for very fast updates after content changes. [b]We're pleased to announce licensing to ArenaNet, Inc. (for 'Guild Wars 2')[/b], to NextPlay Co., Ltd. (for 'Firenze'), and also to yedang online, MAIET entertainment, Inc. and Ani-park, Inc.

PathEngine's tiled 3D content process is based on the application of a horizontal tiling to the existing 3D content processing functionality. The set of source data elements in each tile is processed independantly, with the resulting ground pieces then combined back together for run-time pathfinding.

This ensures that things like process complexity and peak memory load are completely decoupled from overall world complexity, and that total processing times scale essentially linearly with world size.
But the biggest advantage is the possibility for incremental world updates, with processing only required for tiles local to changed content, and with the possibility also for per tile processing to be distributed across threads (to take advantage of multicore CPUs) or even across multiple machines, for the fastest possible update times.

Tiled result pieces can be combined either into a single ground mesh, or into a set of federated overlapping tiles (for use with the SDK's existing 'mesh federation functionality), which then has the effect of also decoupling things like pathfinding preprocess generation and run-time query times from total world size.

Demo applications are included in the PathEngine evaluation SDK, with source code, for tiled 3D content processing with cached per tile results, and also for the construction of federated meshes from tiled ground pieces.
Please see the following page (in the online PathEngine documentation) for more details:
[url=\"http://www.pathengine.com/Contents/ProgrammersGuide/The3DContentProcessingDemo/page.php\"]http://www.pathengine.com/Contents/Program...ngDemo/page.php[/url]

In addition to introducing the tiled 3D process, this release also includes significant optimisations to the existing 3D content process, with big reductions in processing times for most data sets.

Release 5.11.00 also introduces prototype functionality for automatic generation of 'off-mesh connections' as well as a number of important bug-fixes.
A detailed list of all changes made in this (and other) SDK releases can be found in the main SDK change-log:
[url=\"http://www.pathengine.com/changelog.htm\"]http://www.pathengine.com/changelog.htm[/url]