Following-on from the TPV/Developer meeting on the 13th July, during which pathfinding was discussed, and the recent roll-outs of pathfinding functionality to the Magnum Release Channel, the Firestorm team have announced that they will be adding pathfinding support to upcoming releases. The announcement reads in part:

What’s next…Pathfinding!

We’ve decided to release LL’s Pathfinding work in Firestorm in two stages.

Stage 1 (next release).

Pathfinding Tools. Not to be confused with theHavok library, which is used to display Navigation Mesh (NavMesh), thePathfinding Toolsare what you will need to optimize your regions once Pathfinding goes live.

Unless LL changes the current plan, when Pathfinding goes live, all regions will have pathfinding enabled by default, and all objects that contain scripts will be treated as “Movable Obstacles.” Movable Obstacles will have an impact on region performance, so region owners will need tooptimize their regionsby setting scripted objects that don’t move to “Static Obstacles.” To do this, you will need Pathfinding Tools!

So our plan with our next release is to get Pathfinding tools out as soon as we can. This will be based on our 28744 release + post 28744 crash fixes + LL Pathfinding code. There have not been many new additions beyond that since the release, and this is for the best: we expect this code will destabilize the viewer to a degree, since it will be a large merge, and we’d rather base this version on a solid release than on a wild card.

Stage 2 (follow-up release).

Release with the Havok Library for NavMesh. Havok will be used to enable viewing of NavMesh, display of object types and AI Preview of object paths.So the second Firestorm release from now will have Havok + stability fixes to the previous release + more of our own goodies.

The two-stage release is unsurprising, given Lorca Linden’s recommendations at the meeting on the 13th July. At this time, no time-scales are available for the releases, because, as Jessica points out in the post:

How soon?

Great question, and a very tough one to answer since there are many factors involved that we have little control over. Like…

LL’s timeline to release Pathfinding;

How much Linden code we have to merge into Firestorm;

How many regressions and new bugs we pick up from that merge;

How long it’ll take us to fix them, etc.

But we want to get these out as soon as we possibly can once it’s live on the grid.

Phoenix

Phoenix will not immediately be getting pathfinding due to the amount of work involved in getting the capabilities integrated into Firestorm. Region holders using Phoenix will still be able to disable/enable pathfinding using a viewer-independent console, but for all else they will need to switch to a viewer that supports the full pathfinding tool set.

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