http://www.seriousgames.org/snagged/...rena-front.jpg
Abstract
Games play an important role in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). They offer an
environment to test ideas about human reasoning, problem solving and other human
abilities. The ultimate goal of AI is to create an artificial man. Games offer the
opportunity to create artificial players which are modeled after human beings. Playing
the game, human beings can interact with these artificial creatures and experience how
well these creatures show human-like behaviour.
Quake III Arena is a computer game that belongs to the genre of first person shoot-em
up games. The player views from a first person perspective and moves around in a realtime
3D virtual world. The most important tasks are staying alive and eliminating
opponents within this virtual world. These opponents are other people, equal in strength
and abilities, connected to the same game through a network or the Internet. The game
has a set of different virtual environments called levels or maps, that contain rooms and
hallways. The players have a whole range of weapons, items and powerups available to
aid in the battles that take place in these maps. Quake III Arena offers various ways to
play the game including team based gameplay modes.
This thesis presents the Quake III Arena bot which is an intelligent artificial player
emulating a human player in the game environment. This artificial player is often called a
bot as an abbreviation for the word robot. With this bot everyone can enjoy the game
and practice, without the need for a network connection to other people. The bot is an
artificial player that only ‘lives’ inside the computer, side by side with the game. The bot
receives information about the game environment directly from the game program as a
set of variables. The game input from the bot is also sent directly to the game program.
Although the bot only ‘lives’ inside the computer, the ingame behaviour of the bot has to
be hard to distinguish from the behaviour of human players. To make the game more
enjoyable and more versatile, a range of different bot characters is used that each play
the game in their own style, and provide different challenges for the human player.
To show human-like behaviour a wide range of techniques and common sense solutions
are used for the bot AI. The Quake III Arena bot is the first commercially developed
artificial player that uses fully automated path and route finding through arbitrary
complex 3D polygonal worlds, without the need for the bot to acquire knowledge about
routing and navigation during gameplay. No human intervention is required to provide
the bot with all the information needed to navigate through, and understand new game
environments. The bot uses a volume (area) based representation of the 3D game
environment, which serves as a back-bone for the bot’s cognitive world model. Together
with a high performance path finding solution this cognitive model makes the bot rather
resource efficient.
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