Planning and Reactive Agents in Dynamic Game Environments - An Experimental Study

Roman Barták, Cyril Brom, Martin Černý, Jakub Gemrot

2013

Abstract

Many contemporary computer games can be described as dynamic real-time simulations inhabited by autonomous intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) where most of the environmental structure is immutable and navigating through the environment is one of the most common activities. Though controlling the behaviour of such agents seems perfectly suited for action planning techniques, planning is not widely adopted in existing games. This paper contributes to discussion whether the current academic planning technology is ready for integration to existing games and under which conditions. The paper compares reactive techniques to classical planning in handling the action selection problem for IVAs in game-like environments. Several existing classical planners that occupied top positions in the International Planning Competition were connected to the virtual environment of Unreal Development Kit via the Pogamut platform. Performance of IVAs employing those planners and IVAs with reactive architecture was measured on a class of game-inspired maze-like test environments under different levels of external interference. It was shown that agents employing classical planning techniques outperform reactive agents if the size of the planning problem is small or if the environment changes are either hostile to the agent or not very frequent.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Barták R., Brom C., Černý M. and Gemrot J. (2013). Planning and Reactive Agents in Dynamic Game Environments - An Experimental Study . In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART, ISBN 978-989-8565-38-9, pages 234-240. DOI: 10.5220/0004254202340240

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icaart13,
author={Roman Barták and Cyril Brom and Martin Černý and Jakub Gemrot},
title={Planning and Reactive Agents in Dynamic Game Environments - An Experimental Study},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART,},
year={2013},
pages={234-240},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004254202340240},
isbn={978-989-8565-38-9},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART,
TI - Planning and Reactive Agents in Dynamic Game Environments - An Experimental Study
SN - 978-989-8565-38-9
AU - Barták R.
AU - Brom C.
AU - Černý M.
AU - Gemrot J.
PY - 2013
SP - 234
EP - 240
DO - 10.5220/0004254202340240