Learning Heuristics for Tactical Path-finding in Computer Games
Kyeonah Yu · Journal of Korea Multimedia Society · 2009
Tactical path-finding in computer games is path-finding where a path is selected by considering not only basic elements such as the shortest distance or the minimum time spend but also tactical information of surroundings when deciding character's moving trajectory. One way to include tactical information in path-finding is to represent a heuristic function as a sum of tactical quality multiplied by a weighting factor which is.. determined based on the degree of its importance. The choice of weighting factors for tactics is very important because it controls search performance and the characteristic of paths found. In this paper. we propose a method for improving a heuristic function by adjusting weights based on the difference between paths on examples given by a level designer and paths found during the search process based on the CUITent weighting factors. The proposed method includes the search algorithm modified to detect search errors and learn heuristics and the perceptron-like weight updating formular. Through simulations it is demonstrated how different paths found by tactical path-finding are from those by traditional path-finding. We analyze the factors that affect the performance of learning and show the example applied to the real game environments.