ABSTRACT
A large portion of the believability of AI characters in shooter and role-playing games comes from how they act in their environment. This often goes beyond what the character elects to do and gets into where the character decides to do it. Certainly, technologies such as traditional pathfinding and automatic cover selection provide much of this illusion. Influence mapping is not a new technology. There have been many articles and lectures on the subject. Tactical influence maps are primarily used by individual agents to assist in making tactical and positional decisions in individual or small group combat. The influence map does not actually provide instruction—it only provides information that is used by the decision-making structures of the agents. The important thing to remember when selecting formulas is that the response curve simply shapes the propagation of the influence as it spreads away from the agent’s location.
