Introduction

PathEngine is a sophisticated tool-kit designed to support intelligent agent movement in virtual worlds.
Specifically, PathEngine deals with agent movement over a set of predefined ground surfaces.

The core pathfinding engine provides agent and obstruction management, collision queries, pathfinding queries and methods designed to facilitate the process of moving agents along paths.

The tool kit also includes tools for defining the set of ground surfaces on which agent movement is to take place and examples and tutorials to demonstrate application of the engine to implement robust and intelligent agent movement.

A focus on pathfinding

The tool-kit focuses on the pathfinding component of intelligent agent movement. This is because the design of this component (and the general paradigm for pathfinding) has proven historically to remain relevant across a number of projects while the implementation of higher level AI and behaviour code changed necessarily to reflect differences in requirements with respect to character animation, AI and so on.

For a complete agent movement solution, users implement a behaviour layer on top of PathEngine.
Implementation at this level will be sensitive to specific application requirements, but the SDK examples include code that can be adapted to greatly simplify the creation of this behaviour layer.

Points-of-visibility pathfinding

Specifically, PathEngine is built around a 'points-of-visibility' approach to pathfinding.
Among other things this approach naturally leads to a strong geometric paradigm ('movement model') which underpins the SDK, resulting in well-defined functionality and a clear interface.