Ground Attributes

PathEngine supports the association of a number of attributes with faces in the ground mesh.
Some attributes control PathEngine's content processing, and do not get carried through to the run-time ground mesh.
Some attributes can influence agent movement, or otherwise affect run-time functionality.

A complete list of PathEngine face attributes can be found here.
Not all face attributes can be set directly from within content packages.

Face attributes are boolean (true or false) or integer values.
Applications may associate integer values with other information if desired.

Surface type

The 'surfaceType' attribute is intended to encode information about the kind of material present at a given position on the ground. e.g. Wood, stone, mud, etc.
This might then be queried at application run-time to determine things like the kind of sound to play for footprints when characters walk on this part of the ground.

PathEngine also supports the association of a 'cost to traverse' with a given surface type.
For example, mud areas might be considered more difficult to walk across than stone.
This cost is setup by the application run-time. The job of the content creator is simply to mark areas in a ground mesh with the relevant surface type values.

Section ID and terrain layers

The 'sectionID' attribute enables a ground mesh to be divided into numbered sections by the content creator.

Importantly, these sections can be used to mark 'terrain layers', so that height detail can be stripped out of terrain sections of a ground mesh. Refer to Stripping Height Detail out of Terrain Areas for more information.

Section IDs can also be used by the application run-time when resolving 3D positions to positions on the ground, as well as for other arbitrary, application specific purposes.