Incorporating Human Relationships Into Path Planning

Abstract

While pathfinding is ubiquitous in games, it is most often abstracted away fromeverything else that is going on in the game and viewed as a simple point-to-pointshortest 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 looksat how the relationship between characters in a game should influence the pathsthat are taken through the game. We suggest a simple model of character relationshipsand show how this can be used to influence the paths that are taken through theworld. Finally, we discuss design-related issues of how this could be incorporatedinto games.