Overview of pathfinding

At a high level, the pathfinding provides tools and functions to enable smoother and smarter movement behavior for non-avatar entities in Second Life (for example, monsters in a game, rats in a haunted house, wisps in a fantasy forest). In gaming terminology, these entities are referred to as NPCs (non-player characters) or mobs (mobile objects).

Up till now, content creators had to use resource-intensive scripting work-arounds to emulate intelligent NPC movement. With the addition of pathfinding, content creators will have a much easier and better performing way of creating NPCs that can move around in the world. NPCs will be able to use built-in functions to avoid obstacles, move around corners, climb inclines, and move across region boundaries - all things very difficult or even impossible before the implementation of pathfinding. Pathfinding will also allow for new gameplay mechanics (such as creating food that attracts monsters in a game). Please note that pathfinding is not an animation system, which is to say that it does not provide a way to animate a biped or quadruped in conjunction with the new movement functionality. Existing methods for animating non-player objects will still work the same way as before (which is to say, will still be difficult). Even still,pathfinding allows for more vibrant environment with movement and much better enemies within SL games than was previously possible.