Incorporating Human Relationships Into Path Planning

While pathfinding is ubiquitous in games, it is most often abstracted away fromeverything else that is going on in the game and viewed as a simple point-to-pointshortest path problem. The notable exception to this is work on tactical pathfinding.Tactical pathfinding incorporates tactical elements, most often for battle simulations,into the pathfinding engine in order to improve high-level behavior. This paper looksat how the relationship between characters in a game should influence the pathsthat are taken through the game. We suggest a simple model of character relationshipsand show how this can be used to influence the paths that are taken through theworld. Finally, we discuss design-related issues of how this could be incorporatedinto games.