Bethesda Licenses Kynapse For Zombie's Rogue Warrior

Publisher and developer Bethesda Softworks has announced that it has selected Kynapse for Rogue Warrior, a creative tactical Unreal Engine 3 first person shooter that is currently being developed by Zombie Studios for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. The Kynapse middleware solution includes specific features for next-generation platforms, including hierarchical 3D pathfinding compatible with streaming mechanisms, and 3D dynamic pathfinding for full physics games. The software also offers automatic 3D perception and pathfinding data generation supporting very large maps, 3D topology dynamic analysis, team coordination mechanisms, and AI architecture with high level performance. Kynapse is currently in use by a number of mainstream developers, including Electronic Arts, Sega, Atari, Real Time Worlds, and Lionhead Studios, as well as behind serious game products by EADS, and British Aerospace. Kynapse gives NPCs the ability to move around in any 3D dynamic world, understand their environment, hide, communicate, cooperate, drive vehicles, and more. “A major reason for selecting Kynapse was its seamless integration within the Unreal 3 Engine,” said Todd Vaughn, VP of Development at Bethesda Softworks. “Our development team was able to leverage Kynapse full set of functionalities and tools very quickly. We can generate automatically Kynapse streamable hierarchical AI data directly within the Unreal Editor. The use of Kynapse pathfinding is transparent and Kynapse low level AI perfectly complements our advanced high level AI.”