The SimpleFPS Planning Domain: A PDDL Benchmark for Proactive NPCs, Stavros Vassos, and Michail Papakonstantinou, In Proceedings of the Non-Player Character AI workshop (NPCAI-2011) of the Artificial Intelligence & Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-2011) Conference, Stanford CA, USA, 2011.
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Abstract:
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 well-known planners from the planning community.

Bibtex:

@inproceedings{vassos11simplefps,
author = {Vassos, Stavros and Papakonstantinou, Michail},
booktitle = {AIIDE 2011 Workshop on Non Player Character AI},
location = {Stanford, California, USA},
month = oct,
title = {The {SimpleFPS} Planning Domain: A {PDDL} Benchmark for Proactive {NPCs}},
year = {2011}
}