Though there’s a lot of focus placed on textures, animation, environmental effects and particle effects, one of the most under-rated and yet wholly important aspects of a game is its path-finding. Without path-finding, you’ll see AI companions running into walls while enemies have a hard time figuring out how to scale basic barriers. As gaming technology improves, what will APIs like DirectX 12 do to improve path-finding?
David Miles, CTO of BabelFlux LLC which created Navpower, spoked to GamingBolt about the benefit of reduced CPU overhead for DirectX 12 especially when it comes to path-finding. “Obviously this is great for us because it frees up a lot more CPU resources that can be used for a variety of things including AI. Most clients only allocate a few percent of the total CPU available to the game for AI processing, including things such as dynamic obstacles, pathfinding, and character steering.”
Aside from high-end PCs, will Navpower be implemented for mobile gaming on smartphones and tablets in the near future? “That’s a good question. Although NavPower isn’t well known as a mobile pathfinding solution, it’s actually been used on a number of mobile games and we’ve worked with AAA developers to optimize key portions of the code for mobile platforms. So yes, it’s already available and works quite well.”
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