Rare’s secret titles go smart
The company will use a licensed AI engine for two Xbox 360 games
Why wasting your own precious time developing complex tools for your games when you can afford paying for some top-notch technology developed by others?
The creators of the PathEngine Software Development Kit (SDK) announced last week through its own website, that they have licensed its pathfinding and collision middleware system for two yet unannounced Rare Xbox 360 titles.
According to Gamasutra, “The PathEngine SDK is built around an implementation of points-of-visibility pathfinding on three-dimensional ground meshes. The approach enables PathEngine to provide both pathfinding and collision in tight integration against a single agent movement model that takes agent shape into account and supports overlapping geometry, with dynamic obstacles directly integrated into this movement model.”
For those of you allergic to all kind of technical vocabulary this is the alternate explanation: basically, PathEngine is an AI engine that can solve some of the problems that non-playable characters face in some 3D environments, making them behave more wisely when carrying out some complex tasks, like reaching to certain point by avoiding some obstacles.
For gaming purposes, the cost of a PathEngine license is only 13,000 euros (over 18,900 dollars), which is obviously a bargain when you are Microsoft.
Unfortunately, there are no more details of which games (or even from which gaming genres) may use this application, but just remember that two months ago Shane Kim recognized that, apart from Banjo 3, Rare is also working on “a couple of unannounced projects.”
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