# Behavior Steering behaviors: Seeking and Arriving

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Steering behaviors are use to maneuver IA agents in a 3D environment. With these behaviors, agents are able to better react to changes in their environment.

While the navigation mesh algorithm is ideal for planning a path from one point to another, it can't really deal with dynamic objects such as other agents. This is where steering behaviors can help.

## What are steering behaviors?

Steering behaviors are an amalgam of different behaviors that are used to organically manage the movement of an AI agent.

For example, behaviors such as obstacle avoidance, pursuit and group cohesion are all steering behaviors...

Steering behavior are usually applied in a 2D plane: it is sufficient, easier to implement and understand. (However, I can think of some use cases that require the behaviors to be in 3D, like in games where the agents fly to move)

One of the most important behavior of all steering behaviors is the seeking behavior. We also added the arriving behavior to make the agent's movement a whole lot more organic.

Steering behaviors are described in this paper.

## What is the seeking behavior?

The seeking behavior is the idea that an AI agent  "seeks" to have a certain velocity (vector).

To begin, we'll need to have 2 things:

1. An initial velocity (a vector)
2. A desired velocity (also a vector)

First, we need to find the velocity needed for our agent to reach a desired point... This is usually a subtraction of the current position of the agent and the desired position.

$$\overrightarrow{d} = (x_{t},y_{t},z_{t}) - (x_{a},y_{a},z_{a})$$

Here, a represent our agent and t our target. d is the desired velocity

Secondly, we must also find the agent's current velocity, which is usually already available in most game engines.

Next, we need to find the vector difference between the desired velocity and the agent's current velocity. it literally gives us a vector that gives the desired velocity when we add it to that agent's current velocity. We will call it "steering velocity".

$$\overrightarrow{s} = \overrightarrow{d} - \overrightarrow{c}$$

Here, s is our steering velocity, c is the agent's current velocity and d is the desired velocity

After that, we truncate our steering velocity to a length called the "steering force".

Finally, we simply add the steering velocity to the agent's current velocity .

// truncateVectorLocal truncate a vector to a given length
Vector3f currentDirection = aiAgentMovementControl.getWalkDirection();
Vector3f wantedDirection = targetPosition.subtract(aiAgent.getWorldTranslation()).normalizeLocal().setY(0).multLocal(maxSpeed);

// We steer to our wanted direction
Vector3f steeringVector = truncateVectorLocal(wantedDirection.subtract(currentDirection), steeringForce);
Vector3f newCurrentDirection = MathExt.truncateVectorLocal(currentDirection.addLocal(MathExt.truncateVectorLocal(wantedDirection.subtract(currentDirection), m_steeringForce).divideLocal(m_mass)), maxSpeed);

This computation is done frame by frame: this means that the steering velocity becomes weaker and weaker as the agent's current velocity approaches the desired one, creating a kind of interpolation curve.

## What is the arriving behavior?

The arrival behavior is the idea that an AI agent who "arrives" near his destination will gradually slow down until it gets there.

We already have a list of waypoints returned by the navigation mesh algorithm for which the agent must cross to reach its destination. When it has passed the second-to-last point, we then activate the arriving behavior.

When the behavior is active, we check the distance between the destination and the current position of the agent and change its maximum speed accordingly.

// This is the initial maxSpeed
float maxSpeed = unitMovementControl.getMoveSpeed();

// It's the last waypoint
float distance = aiAgent.getWorldTranslation().distance(nextWaypoint.getCenter());
float rampedSpeed = aiAgentMovementControl.getMoveSpeed() * (distance / slowingDistanceThreshold);
float clippedSpeed = Math.min(rampedSpeed, aiAgentMovementControl.getMoveSpeed());

// This is our new maxSpeed
maxSpeed = clippedSpeed;

Essentially, we slow down the agent until it gets to its destination.

## The future?

As I'm writing this, we've chosen to split the implementation of the steering behaviors individually to implement only the bare necessities, as we have no empirical evidence that we'll need to implement al of them. Therefore, we only implemented the seeking and arriving behaviors, delaying the rest of the behaviors at an indeterminate time in the future,.

So, when (or if) we'll need it, we'll already have a solid and stable foundation from which we can build upon.

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• By Ey-Lord
Hello everyone

I am here to gather your opinion, remarks, ideas or any constructive criticism you may have about what I am going to present. Don’t be shy!

A bit of background:

I am working alone on an indy web-based game, a simulation of RPG (idle game) where the player controls a group of 4 characters that he can sent into battle and that will fight automatically based on some AI preference that are similar to the FF 12 system (but more complex / powerful). He then earns some experience and resources that he can use to improve his unit’s gear, talents and skills. He has a lot of control on what skills his characters will use and how/when.

What brings me here today:

The AI of Monsters. I have the AI settings for players covered (basically a bunch of if/then/and/or/else settings that he can combine and order so that his units will act as he intends in battle). I’ve been working on the AI of monsters for quite some time, made a long break and came back recently to it.

Short description of the battle system:

No movement involved. Battle is fully automated. Players setup its units AI settings before battle and monsters are controlled by a separate AI. This is a 4v4 battle, like FF7 with some kind of ATB and any time a unit fill its ATB, it can play and the then the next unit who will fill it will play, etc. The player is completely free of his playstyle and may create very offensive group or very defensive ones. 4 healers or 4 tanks is completely possible.

The battle system is very complex and allows for very varied and sometimes unusual strategies, like killing your own allies to proc an “on death buff” that will be devastating for the opponent.

What I want for my AI?

It needs to be fun to fight against and challenging. Ideally, I would like an AI as smart as possible (not omniscient but thinking as a human would). I know that a super-smart AI is not always the best way to make a game fun or challenging but in the context of my game, this is the result I want to achieve. It may seem unfair to have the AI try to kill your squishy while your tank is standing right there but my class design gives the tools to players to counter that so it’s not an issue (tanks are not purely aggro based for example). I want players to always be challenged by AI moves and that they must carefully think about their strategy because if they leave a big hole in it, I want the AI to exploit it.

In practice, it means a few requirements:

No dumb decision / do not fall into obvious player’s traps Exploit obvious flaws of the opponent Act in coordination when appropriate with other units Able to find who should be their focus in the player’s team (some notion of threat) Find the best move to use and if there is some kind of combo possible, use it

These requirements are harder to meet than it looks. The issue is the sheer number of different mechanisms and strategies available to players and to monsters as well. For example, there are many cases where killing or attacking a player unit might be detrimental (units that return damages or that gain power when you hit then for example).

What I have tried before?

I have tried or at least reviewed many different AI concepts so far.

-          A simple copy of my player’s AI system (hierarchical if/then/else). It was easy to script as I already have the UI in place for players so I can quickly define a basic AI for any new monster’s group. The main drawbacks are that it needs to be written for every monster group, it does not allow smart targeting and cannot find the best target or the best skill to use. It will also make dumbs decision as the targeting options cannot assess threats at all.

I’ve rules out planners since for purely selecting the best pair of (skill, target), they do not seem to match my needs.           (H)FSM or BT does not seems to match my needs as monsters do not have states / transition condition that can lead to something useful for me.        I’ve ruled out aNNs as they might, with proper training, be able to find the best action at a given time but it’s very tedious to implement and will not solve my need of finding combo or coordinating with other units very well. (plus, let’s be honest, I’d be a bit out of my depth to program them)           I have spent an extensive period of time trying with tree searches. Mainly: monte-carlo with random sampling and came to the conclusion that due to the complexity of my battle system, it is excessively costly to compute any kind of reliable data this way.
-        My current AI system is a version of my first one (the same as the players) but with access to some “smarter” targeting function that in theory allow to choose the best target. These functions work by gathering data for thousands of simulated fights during the AI time to play (1 second). It’s a first step to find the best target but not very accurate (lots of big flaws that can be exploited by players) and it is very time consuming and that is something I’m trying to get away from. I do not want to use 100% of the players CPU as I do now.

What is my latest idea?

I started to study more in-depth the Utility theory as described by Dave Marks (I read his book and watched his GDC AI lectures as well). I liked the idea. I like that I can start on something relatively simple and add more considerations as things progress to handle more and more situations. While my work began as something very close to utility theory, it evolved a bit afterward. Here is what I plan on doing to compute a unit’s best course of action:

A – Score every of its move (each move is a pair [skill, target]).

B – Chose the move according to a selection strategy (highest score, weighted random, random amongst the top scores… lots of different selection algorithm can be used there).

So far, easy, right? Let’s dig deeper into our first phase of scoring (A), which is the hard part. For all the damage or healing skills:

Step 1: The final scoring of the move [skill,target] will be function of the a “Survival” scoring for the player team and for the enemy team. An example of this relationship could be: Adding all the survival scores of each unit in Team A and divide the result by the addition of all the survival scores for each unit in team B.

Step 2: The survival score of each unit will be its Health after the move we are evaluating, divided by the total damage per turn that we estimate other units can deal to her (minus the total heal it ca receive). [This a step where we can process damage and heal over time as well]

Step 3: This damage per turn estimation will be, initially, the sum for every unit in battle of the damage or heal per second it can deal to that unit. For example: If I’m alone vs 2 bad guy that can deal 1 dmg/turn and if I can deal 1 heal/turn, the damage per turn estimation against me will be 2-1 = 1. [This is not optimal since we are counting the damage of each unit once per enemy unit but it’s a start]

Step 4: To compute the DPS or HPS of each unit, we review the unit’s skills and compute their output against the unit we want to evaluate it against. From that, we construct a skill sequence to maximize the damage output and once we got the optimal skill sequence, we can compute its DPS or HPS output and pass it along for Step 3.

It might seem like a lot of work, since, in a world with only damage or healing skills, the DPS or HPS sequence of each unit will be the same in every situation and as such only the damage done or healing done by the skill evaluated would be enough. But…

The tricky part comes from buffs and debuffs. If we use the above algorithm, (de)buffs that changes the damage or healing someone does or receive will be evaluated correctly as it will change the damage or heal per second output of units and it would affect the survival score and the final scoring. That is why I chose to include DPS and HPS computations for each unit for each move.

This is all fine until we consider (de)buffs that changes the power of other (de)buffs. Like: I cast a buff that double the length of all my future buffs. My algorithm can’t evaluate it correctly. It’s a situation that will be common enough in my game and I want my AI to deal with it. Note: there are more complex situations where a unit could buff a buff that buffs a buff that buff a buff [….] that will end-up buffing a damage or healing skills, but those cases will not be addressed as they will hopefully be rare and too cumbersome to compute anyway.

So, my goal is to score properly buffs that:

Buffs the damage or healing output of someone           Buffs that buffs a skill that does the above

L    Long story short of how I am doing that. I’m using my initial algorithm but while also estimating damage or healing per second change for each dps or hps sequence.To do that I’m evaluating every move of the unit (or every unit in case of AoE but lets keep it simple with single target) that is targeted by the buff. So, we are switching PoV here compared to the initial unit we are evaluating (unless the move evaluated is buffing itself)

-          I’m doing the above in 2 situations:

o   A : After a cast of the buff skill I’m evaluating

o   B : Without the cast of the buff, just like if it was that unit’s turn to play

-          Using a sort of min/max approach: if the unit targeted by the buff is an ally, we will take the best branch of our tree in A and compare it with the same branch (pair [skill,target]) in B. If the unit targeted by the buff is an enemy, we want to lower their maximum score and will select the tree branch that does that in A to also compare it with the same branch in B.

-          The information we extract here are DPS or HPS delta for each sequence of DPS/HPS for each unit vs each other unit.

-          Then, we go back to our steps 1 to 5 and compute our scoring for the move (buff) while using our new dps/hps deltas to get better and more accurate dps/hps sequence for units affected by the buff.

This is basically it. I’ve ran a manual version of the algorithm in 2 different battle settings to test it and see if it gave good results. It worked. Not flawlessly but it worked. Lots of cases will still require tweak and additions to the basic idea but I think its promising. (taunts and CCs are not easy to deal with but it’s manageable)

What I like is that I can add more considerations later (as in the utility theory) like: resource cost, general unit strategy (cleave or focus), behavior (careful, lunatic, reckless). While this will still be a bit time consuming it should be a good order of magnitude faster than my current AI. It also does not prevent me from adding hardcoded AI move if I want to “script” more some monsters. Debugging and tweaking might be a bit painful though, especially when fights will involve lots of skills & stats but that’s an issue that most AI for my game would likely have anyway.

To come back with my initial goals:

No dumb decision / do not fall into obvious player’s traps
o   Not perfect but it should choose the best target whenever possible

Exploit obvious flaws of the opponent
o   Same as above

Act in coordination when appropriate with other units
o   This can be done simply by adding weight to some targets or computing moves for all units of a group before deciding which one to take (for example to take the best move vs a specific unit, on average)

Able to find who should be their focus in the player’s team (some notion of threat)
o   It will naturally focus the unit who is the easiest to kill and debuff or CC the ones that deal the more heal/damage. But, to better solve this, we will need to add other considerations to the AI scoring process, It should not be *too* hard

Find the best move to use and if there is some kind of combo possible, use it
o   Combo are very often in the form of buff/debuff setup before an actual damaging or healing skills and my AI can compute up to a 3 moves combo (buff > buff > skill that dmg or heal) which should cover most cases.

I’m quite happy with my initial tests. I’m not going to be coding it now. My goal was to reflect on the subject on paper and try to see if designing my AI would be a roadblock or not for my project. There are a few other area I want to design and take time to really think about before getting back to my project full time. I’d love to hear your toughs and feedbacks about my AI ideas. Do you see huge roadblocks I’m missing? Does it sound ok to you?

If you read that far…. thank you and I can"t wait to hear from you guys😊

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