Stephen Flockton

What is my Project? What is Planning? Advantages and Disadvantages of

Planning. Description of the Product. Product Demonstration. Problems/Successes. Conclusions from the Project.

This project is about: Investigating the application of planners

in video games and academia. Discovering the strengths and

weaknesses of planners. Evaluating planners as an AI technique Creating and testing a planner to gain a

better insight to their application.

F.E.A.R – First Encounter Assault Recon

Monolith Productions 2005

Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl

GSC Game World

Planning is an AI technique where agents create plans solve their own personal goals.A plan consists of a list of actions which lead to the agents goal being solved.

Goal – Kill Target.Example Plan:

Find Gun Reload GunFire at Target

A planning system consists of the following: A World State Definition Actions Goals Planning Engine

Goal Goal Satisfied Satisfied

Check Check World World StateState

Create Create GoalGoal

Form PlanForm Plan

Perform Perform ActionAction

Update Update World World StateState

Plan Plan InvalidatedInvalidated

Flexibility Modularity Believability Emergent Behaviour Ease of Debugging

Additional work on initial architecture Heavy need for optimisation Not right for every game Hard to get the frequency of plans just

right

This product is a custom built planner which solves a simple domain model in real time.The planner is based on a Iteratively deepening depth first search of world states.The domain is a simple scenario originally created by Lee McCluskey.

The planner is in time where M is the mean number of actions, K is the search depth and N is the number of actions to the goal.

A custom symbolic World State was created for the planner.

It is based on Jeff Orkin's Implementation in FEAR

Consists of several enumerated types which make up an object. All objects can then be represented symbolically

Initial difficulties with the input language. Problems with depth first search. Keeping the execution speed down. Initial design of World State definition

was a challenge to design. Long plans take exponential time

World State definition very flexible and expressive.

Planner can make intelligent plans Planner can make short plans very fast Improvement of personal design skills

•AI planning is key to the next set of advances in video game technology.

•Flexibility and modularity make it ideal for the game development process.

•I’ve personally learned a lot from this project.

Team based AI planning.

Investigation into wider system integration.

Research into speed increases and heuristics