AIC Seminar Series

In this paper we focus on proactive behavior for nonplayer characters (NPCs) in the first-person shooter (FPS) genre of video games based on goal-oriented planning. Some recent approaches for applying realtime planning in commercial video games show that the existing hardware is starting to follow up on the computing resources needed for such techniques to work well. Nonetheless, it is not clear under which conditions real-time efficiency can be guaranteed. In this paper we give a precise specification of SimpleFPS, a STRIPS planning domain expressed in PDDL that captures some basic planning tasks that may be useful in a first-person shooter video game. This is intended to work as a first step towards quantifying the performance of different planning techniques that may be used in real-time to guide the behavior of NPCs. We present a simple tool we developed for generating random planning problem instances in PDDL with user defined properties, and show some preliminary results based on SimpleFPS instances that vary in the size of the domain and two wellknown planners from the planning community.

Stavros Vassos received his B.Sc. degree from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of the National Technical University of Athens in Greece. In 2005 he received the M.Sc. degree and in 2009 the Ph.D.degree from the Computer Science Department of the University of Toronto under the supervision of Professor Hector J. Levesque. He is currently working as a research associate at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece. His research interests lie mainly in the area of Artificial Intelligence, in particular logic-based approaches for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Reasoning about Action and Change, as well as Intelligent Agent Design. During his studies in the University of Toronto he was an active developer of the high-level agent programming language IndiGolog. In 2008 he recieved the AAAI Outstanding Paper Honorable Mention Award for his joint paper with Professor H. J. Levesque "On the Progression of Situation Calculus Basic Action Theories: Resolving a 10-year-old Conjecture".

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