Planning for Reactive Behaviors in Hide and Seek

We describe the ZAROFF system, a plan-based controller for the players in a game of hide and seek. The system features visually realistic human figure animation including realistic human locomotion. We discuss the planner's interaction with a changing environment to which it has only limited perceptual access. A hierarchical planner translates the game's goals of finding hiding players into locomotion goals, assisted by a special-purpose search planner. We describe a system of parallel finite state machines for controlling the player's locomotion. Neither path-planning nor explicit instructions are used to drive locomotion; agent control and apparent complexity are the result of the interaction of a few relatively simple behaviors with a complex (and changing) environment. Comments Postprint version. Published in Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Computer Generated Forces and Behavioral Representation, May 1995, 10 pages. This conference paper is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/hms/95