Hello everyone,

As you may know, we've been working on pathfinding along with the Gamestudio engine for some 4-5 years now. We released Intense Pathfinding 1.03 and won first prize on Spring 2006 Contest back in A6, and Intense Pathfinding 2 for A7 about a year ago. I'm now very happy to announce our new free Intense X Zinc plugin.

Intense X Zinc's main features are the following:

• A* Static Pathfinding for unlimited levels, unlimited entities and unlimited nodes
• Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance between dynamic entities (other Npcs, barrels, crates, etc).
• ONE click integration into your existing Lite-C project.
• Will work for all A7 editions (trial,extra,commercial,pro).
• Use Zinc's Movement and Animation fully customizable systems, or let the pathfinding guide entities that use your own movement and animation.
• Intense X Zinc adds easy to use Panels in your WED for customization.
• Command your Npcs or Player to move anywhere using ONE line of code
• more...

Intense X Zinc is designed for beginner and advanced lite-c programmers that wish to add pathfinding to their existing projects.

For non-programmers, you have the choice to upgrade your Zinc to a fully featured Intense X Copper, for an evaluation period of 30 days.


Please watch this 6 minute tutorial on how we added pathfinding to Conitec's Warehouse Demo () that you may download in conitec's downloads page.

Recommended HD Full-Screen Version


I'm looking forward to your comments and response towards the video tutorial. Please let me know WHAT features you'd like, and what you're concerned about when adding 3rd party plugins to your games. By this product, I hope to help anyone add pathfinding to their projects, whatever their experience level and game genre they're working on.

If I don't receive any criticism or further enhancements I could add to Zinc, I will post a download link to the current version (Intense X Zinc 1.0.0) here.

Looking forward for your comments,
Aris

Firstly, I havent "studied" this product yet, so I only have a vague
understanding of how it functions.

It may just be the way I am interpreting your sales jargon, but it appears
that the Zinc package comes as a trial "copper" package that will downgrade itself at 30 days.
I dislike this idea greatly. Zinc should be bundled with free-ware "material" only.
If you want to bundle a level for demo purposes, use crude or freeware levels/models.
If I want trial-ware, I will download trial-ware, and delete trial-ware when it expires.
This is my personal out-look on trialware "stuff". Its just dirty...

Next, "this" page advertises Zinc as "...unlimited entities and unlimited nodes",
but the page behind the "more..." link says only 999 entities and 999 nodes per level.
Are they both right? Or is one page incorrect/out-of-date?

Now some technical questions.
1> Does Zinc allow run-time creation/removal of nodes?
2> If an entity loses his path, due to node removal or getting "knocked off" the path,
does he head back to nearest/easily-reached/default node on his own?
2a> If not, could we users code a way for this to happen?
(eg lost entity will create a temporary-private node at his own location,
that is connected (at some point) to his original path, which he can then
follow and which will delete once he sucessfully reaches his old path)

Thanks, it does look good. So keep up the good work.

Hi Aris,

thank you for this great contribution.

There was a section in your video where you have to place nodes near an already defined path.
If it would be possible to attach an exsisting path to a node in order to let it create new nodes for your path generator, this would help users to reuse their levels faster.

Zinc controlled NPCs and other code controlled entities can share the same paths this was. - No need to define it twice.

Great work - I hope to see lots of user demos soon

Michael

um the zinc demo edition is best than the copper edition (edit: the zinc have new options in the panels)
when are a update avalaible for copper?

Cool! Brand new pathfinder.

we can't really criticize until there's a download link! Can't wait! By the way, thank you for making such a fantastic plugin!

@EvilSOB - Zinc is free but you can click on some button to try the Copper for 30 days...but Zinc is free

could you add more smoother rotation while following nodes?
it'll be a great plugin, thnx

looks great, looking forward to it, great job Intense-X Team
(i have the Cooper, but possibly will use the zinc since i will only need pathfinding)

@croman, as it said in the video, guess we can use our own movement code,so we can do that smooth rotation thing ourselves?

ohhh great! NOWWW they release it, after i implemented the old one.. lol, anyways, it looks great.. just wondering if it handles physics movement or move by c_move

yeah after i just get the old working .
But great, I will implement it asap.
Awesome contribution.

EDIT: Will it be posibble to just include a script and dont do the things over wed, only in the script? And is it possible to call the moveto function with the my pointer?