Key Performance Optimisations

Small, convex obstacles

Environments with lots of detail obstacles and high visibility can often be difficult to represent for pathfinding.
PathEngine features an optimisation specifically targetting this kind of environment based on automatic identification of a set of obstacles that can be easily avoided with minimal effect on the overall path.
Refer to Pathfinding Through Forests for details about this optimisation.

Unobstructed space optimisation

In cases where it is not necessary to work with an exact expanded agent unobstructed space representation you can tell PathEngine to perform a boundary simplification step on the unobstructed space boundaries, with knock-on effects on complexity.
Refer to Unobstructed Space Optimisation for details about this optimisation.

Terrain callbacks

Working with large terrain areas can potentially involve a lot of data.
To avoid terrain areas being represented twice, and to ensure efficient height queries, height detail can be stripped out of parts of a ground mesh and a callback supplied to provide access to a application side representation.
Refer to Working with Terrain for details about this optimisation.

Limiting query scope

Paths can be constrained to a rectangular region to avoid detail outside that region affecting query times.
Refer to Limiting the Scope for Pathfinding for details about this feature.

Mesh 'federations'

PathEngine supports the generation of tiled sets (or 'federations') of overlapping pathfinding meshes.
This enables seamless pathfinding to be implemented over environments of effectively unlimited size and complexity, but at the cost of a 'maximum guaranteed query distance' constraint.
The feature can also be used to improve performance, or to tradeoff memory footprint and performance, for environments of moderate complexity.
Refer to Mesh Federations for details.