PathEngine home previous: Programmers Guidenext: Choosing an Approach
Contents, Programmers Guide, World Representation

World Representation

PathEngine's world representation is based on ground meshes (to define a set of surfaces in the world over which agents can move).
In addition to these surfaces, PathEngine's world representation also includes ground attributes, static obstacles placed on the surfaces, named positions and named (dynamic) obstacles for supporting scripting or behaviours.

The generation of this world representation is often a key issue in the content side of integration between PathEngine and your application.
Several approaches to the generation of this world representation are supported.

For large or complex worlds PathEngine supports seamless pathfinding across sets of tiled overlapping mesh instances, or 'mesh federations'. With this technique the size of your worlds is limited only by available working memory (with the possibility to distribute federations across multiple machines to eliminate even this constraint), at the cost of a limitation on 'maximum guaranteed query distance'.

Contents

Choosing an Approach
2D Content Processing
3D Content Processing
Direct XML Generation
PathEngine Coordinates
Obstacle Placement
Setting Face Attributes
Representing Regions with Cost to Traverse
Working with Terrain
Pathfinding Through Forests
Mesh Federations

Documentation for PathEngine release 6.04 - Copyright © 2002-2024 PathEnginenext: Choosing an Approach