An Interactive Path-Planning Method Based On Artificial Potential Field In Real-Time Strategy (RTS) Games

In real-time strategy (RTS) games, path planning is one of the typical and importanttasks for game players. To meet the requirement of real-time response, the game players needto find an offensive path quickly. Besides, there are often interactions among game unitswhich will greatly influence the quality of path planning. Traditional pathfinding algorithmssuch as Dijkstra and A*are widely used algorithm which can find an optimal path. However,they cannot meet the strict time limit in RTS games and do not consider the unit interactions.This paper selects a typical RTS game attack-defense scenario, and presents a fast anddynamic path-planning method based on artificial potential field. We also introduce theconcept of fuzzy measure to describe the interaction of units. Our main contributions are asfollows:1. The development of an interactive and dynamic pathfinding method by introducingfuzzy measure and integral in traditional potential field method. Fuzzy measure and fuzzyintegral are used to describe interactions among game units. The purpose is to reduce theoccurrence of local minimum of traditional potential field method and to improve thepath-planning quality. It also solves the problem where the interactive damage around thedefense units is non-linear and meets the real-time and dynamic requirements of RTS games.2. The introduction of a repulsive gain factor M to the repulsive potential function in thepotential field method, which indicates the degree of the interactions around the defense units.The simulation results show that the damages of fuzzy potential field attacker are lower thanthe traditional ones; and the proposed method is more efficient and makes the selected gamescenario be closer to the real games.