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Fusion: Practice and Applications
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Title

Toward the Believability of Non-Player Characters (NPC) Movement in Video Games

  Rawia Mohamed 1 * ,   Waleed Al Adrousy 2 ,   Samir Elmougy 3

1  Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Computers and Information, Mansoura University, Mansoura 35516, Egypt
    (peri_mohamed@yahoo.com)

2  Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Computers and Information, Mansoura University, Mansoura 35516, Egypt
    (waleed_m_m@mans.edu.eg)

3  Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Computers and Information, Mansoura University, Mansoura 35516, Egypt
    (mougy@mans.edu.eg)


Doi   :   https://doi.org/10.54216/FPA.140106

Received: September 22, 2023 Revised: November, 02 2023 Accepted: November 11, 2023

Abstract :

In video games, artificial intelligence is the effort of going beyond scripted interactions, however complex into the arena of truly interactive systems. To make a game world appear more real, these video games must be responsive, adaptive, and intelligent. For example, in real time strategy games, if there is an enemy seeking/hunting the player, it will be moving in paths, turning around and even maybe jumping in order to find the player. In this case, if the enemy acts/moves more real like human, it will be a benefit for making the game more attractive and exciting. This paper aims to develop a fast, intelligent, and realistic pathfinding approach that makes a user feel that he/she is playing with a human being instead of a machine. To achieve this, this paper presents a Heap Heuristic A* Algorithm as an enhancement of A* algorithm, in which the Chebyshev distance is used to control the smoothness of the resulted path and heapsort algorithm to sort the nodes easily without a lot of memory consumption. Compared to the pervious improved A* algorithms, the proposed algorithm produces a smoother path while consuming less memory to get a final result of human like movement. The experiments results showed that the proposed algorithm reduced the computing time by 66.6% using a grid size of 200*200 compared with A*MOD algorithm. Also, they showed that the proposed work takes almost 91ms to find the path compared to 363 ms and 116 ms when Native A* and A*MOD algorithms are used, respectively, Furthermore, the proposed algorithm performance remains stable in the case of increasing the number of visited nodes, despite the changing order of obstacles.

Keywords :

NPC; artificial agent; path finding; games theory

References :

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Cite this Article as :
Style #
MLA Rawia Mohamed, Waleed Al Adrousy, Samir Elmougy. "Toward the Believability of Non-Player Characters (NPC) Movement in Video Games." Fusion: Practice and Applications, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2024 ,PP. 66-80 (Doi   :  https://doi.org/10.54216/FPA.140106)
APA Rawia Mohamed, Waleed Al Adrousy, Samir Elmougy. (2024). Toward the Believability of Non-Player Characters (NPC) Movement in Video Games. Journal of Fusion: Practice and Applications, 14 ( 1 ), 66-80 (Doi   :  https://doi.org/10.54216/FPA.140106)
Chicago Rawia Mohamed, Waleed Al Adrousy, Samir Elmougy. "Toward the Believability of Non-Player Characters (NPC) Movement in Video Games." Journal of Fusion: Practice and Applications, 14 no. 1 (2024): 66-80 (Doi   :  https://doi.org/10.54216/FPA.140106)
Harvard Rawia Mohamed, Waleed Al Adrousy, Samir Elmougy. (2024). Toward the Believability of Non-Player Characters (NPC) Movement in Video Games. Journal of Fusion: Practice and Applications, 14 ( 1 ), 66-80 (Doi   :  https://doi.org/10.54216/FPA.140106)
Vancouver Rawia Mohamed, Waleed Al Adrousy, Samir Elmougy. Toward the Believability of Non-Player Characters (NPC) Movement in Video Games. Journal of Fusion: Practice and Applications, (2024); 14 ( 1 ): 66-80 (Doi   :  https://doi.org/10.54216/FPA.140106)
IEEE Rawia Mohamed, Waleed Al Adrousy, Samir Elmougy, Toward the Believability of Non-Player Characters (NPC) Movement in Video Games, Journal of Fusion: Practice and Applications, Vol. 14 , No. 1 , (2024) : 66-80 (Doi   :  https://doi.org/10.54216/FPA.140106)