AUTOMATIC CONSTRUCTION OF ROADMAPS FOR PATH PLANNING IN GAMES

Path planning plays an important role in many computer games. Currently the motion of entities is often planned us- ing a combination of scripting, grid-search methods, and re- active approaches. In this paper we describe a new approach, based on a technique from robotics, that computes a roadmap of smooth, collision-free, high-quality paths. This roadmap can be used to obtain instantly good paths for entities. We also describe applications of the technique for planning the motion of groups of entities and for creating smooth camera move- ment through an environment.