Back in industry news, we're seeing the new generation of game tools entering the limelight as Game Developer magazine's 10th honorary Front Line Awards draws to a conclusion. Budding game devs take note: 2007's Front Line Awards winner line up headlines the tools used by the industry's biggest studios to create the next gaming generation's current titles. Get the full list of winners at the full story.

 

According to an official press release handed over by the friendly neighborhood mailman, PathEngine, makers of the self-titled pathfinding and movement SDK, announced Release 5.10 of their SDK. Sporting a ramped up graph search core and improvements in performance for dealing with dynamic obstacles, the SDK was licensed to at least three more parties.

In addition to 3d-io and Dongguk University of Korea, the SDK has been "proudly" announced to be licensed to Creative Assembly, the makers of the phenomenal Total War strategy series. In fact, it has been explicitly stated that the SDK will be incorporated in the UK and Brisbane-based developer's as yet unnamed project for the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Creative Assembly has currently just polished up their Total War Kingdoms expansion for the latest installment to the Total War series, Medieval II: Total Wars. Does that mean there's a totally new Total War title heading for the next-gen console? We'll keep you posted as developments come up.

PathEngine has just announced that their PathEngine pathfinding and agent movement SDK - the muscle behind titles such as Granado Espada and Titan Quest - has just been updated to release 5.06.00. This release adds support for tile by tile construction of individual meshes for PathEngine's existing mesh federation mechanism, used for pathfinding across sets of discrete but overlapping tile meshes.

The mesh federation functionality is essentially a way of splitting a very large world into smaller chunks. At the same time, it guarantees seamless pathfinding across the boundaries between these chunks and doesn't put any constraints on the way geometry is placed with respect to the chunk boundaries. These chunks can then be distributed across servers to manage very large numbers of pathfinding agents, such as in the case of massively multiplayer online games.

The SDK includes extensive integration with the 3DS Max and Maya content platforms, making it very accessible to videogame developers.