Dynamic Guard Patrol in Stealth Games

Abstract

Guard patrols are common in stealth games, both for a sense of realism and to form a basic challenge to acting out covert behaviour. Automated patrol route construction, however, is difficult, as simple approaches based on randomized movement or goal selection tend to result in unrealistic and overly repetitive guarding motion, and poor area coverage. In this work we introduce an approach based on modelling location “staleness” in a manner similar to occupancy maps, but applied to both a grid representation and a dynamically constructed coverage-visibility mesh. The latter provides a continuous abstraction of the game environment which can be efficiently used and maintained for real-time decision making. We use Unity3D and multiple game levels to compare our grid and mesh-based results, showing the advantages of the visibility mesh over the grid-based approach.