14 DAY TRIAL // News comes from PathEngine, a privately held company located in Lyon, France, that the 5.04 version ofits "tool-kit for the implementation of intelligent agent movement", or pathfinding engine for short, is now available.
Specifically, the engine deals with agent movement over a set of predefined ground surfaces. The movement model enables extremely fast pathfinding in complicated environments, with support for dynamically placed obstacles and with agent shape automatically taken into account and it can also be used with environments of moderate complexity in order to improve performance or to trade-off memory footprint and performance. The tool kit also includes tools for defining the set of ground surfaces on which agent movement is to take place, complete with examples and tutorials to demonstrate its application. Additionally, the engine is very modular, easy to understand and to integrate, and support issues are minimal, which keeps costs down.
The pathfinding engine, previously provided by PathEngine in the form of custom content tools and application side code, is already being used by some big name MMO developers, with impressive results. The latest release makes some significant improvements to the core technique, brings it into the main PathEngine distribution, adds additional documentation, and also provides an example project to demonstrate its features.