Tactical Movement Planning for Individual Combatants

Moving computer generated forces realistically has challenged CGF and computer game developers for years. The CGF community has mainly addressed ground vehicle movement, and through a variety of approaches has provided solutions to many entity movement problems. In our project (DISAF), we are faced with the problem of moving individual soldiers rather than vehicles. The vehicle-based movement behaviors and controllers in our software baseline (ModSAF) have proved inadequate for the task. This paper describes the tactical movement task for individual combatants, provides an analysis of path planning algorithms from ModSAF s and the robot planning literature, and presents our algorithm for planning movement. The tactical movement behavior we developed, considers slopes, seeks concealed routes, and adjusts posture and speed when in threatening areas. It uses a combination of grid search and graph search to find paths outside and inside of