Map Abstraction with Adjustable Time Bounds

The paper presented here addresses the problem of path planning in real time strategy games. We have proposed a new algorithm titled Map Abstraction with Adjustable Time Bounds.This algorithm uses an abstract map containing non-uniformly sized triangular sectors; the centroids of the sectors guide thepath search in the game map. In a pre-processing step we calculate an upper and lower time limit to plan paths for a giventwo dimensional grid map that is known beforehand. Dependingon the time limits, we vary the size of the sectors to save search time or to improve path quality. We have experimented usingmaps from commercial games such as Dragon’s Age: Origins and Warcraft III. In the worst case MAAT returns paths that are8% less optimal. MAAT has an expensive pre-processing step which ultimately lowers the overhead CPU time consumedduring game play by 1.1 milliseconds.

Keywords:

Pathfinding , path-planning , map abstraction , hierarchical