Incorporating human relationships into path planning

Abstract

While pathfinding is ubiquitous in games, it is most often abstracted away from everything else that is going on in the game and viewed as a simple point-to-point shortest path problem. The notable exception to this is work on tactical pathfinding. Tactical pathfinding incorporates tactical elements, most often for battle simulations, into the pathfinding engine in order to improve high-level behavior. This paper looks at how the relationship between characters in a game should influence the paths that are taken through the game. We suggest a simple model of character relationships and show how this can be used to influence the paths that are taken through the world. Finally, we discuss design-related issues of how this could be incorporated into games.