PathEngine Announces SDK Release 5.31, New Licensing

PathEngine announces the availability of release 5.31.00 of their pathfinding SDK, including features for unobstructed space optimisation (by boundary simplification) and incremental boundary update. Since our last public release we are also pleased to announce SDK licensing to Maius Games (for 'Monarch Online'), UTPlus Interactive, Firefly Studios (for 'Stronghold Crusader 2'), YD Online (for 'Pae Online') and Nexon (for 'Maple Story 2').

PathEngine unobstructed space is the area inside a ground mesh where agents can be placed without overlapping either the mesh edges or placed obstacles (generated by a 'minkowski sum' expansion of obstruction boundaries by the agent's pathfinding shape).

By default PathEngine will perform an exact expansion, with the unobstructed space boundaries then representing the exact set of non-overlapping positions for the agent (see www.pathengine.com/Contents/Overview/FundamentalConcepts/ThePathEngineMovementModel/page.php, in our online docs). Where a lot of detail objects have been placed this can result in detail corners being present in the expanded unobstructed space boundaries, which then increases the complexity of run-time operations such as collision and pathfinding.

The unobstructed space optimisation feature performs an automated simplification step on these expanded boundaries, removing detail corners where this can be done without a specified distance threshold value being exceeded.

(More information about this optimisation can be found at www.pathengine.com/Contents/ProgrammersGuide/ApplyingtheSDK/UnobstructedSpaceOptimisation/page.php)

Note that this is separate from and complimentary to the 'pathfind space' optimisations in the previous SDK release (which actually split some unobstructed space boundaries out of a simpler pathfind space representation), and both optimisations can potentially be used together for even more significant speed-ups.

Release 5.31 also adds support for incremental updates to unobstructed space representations after certain run-time changes, with it now possible in particular to track connectivity through unobstructed space and to perform 'connected region queries' against changing door obstacle states, with very fast update times.

Also in this release, the SDK has now been ported to Android, there are improvements in the find closest point functionality and some new example projects added (including a new group movement example).

For full details about the complete set of changes for this release please refer to the SDK changelog: www.pathengine.com/changelog.htm