ABSTRACT
Steering behaviors are extremely common in the games industry. Context steering behaviors are small and stateless and guarantee any desired movement constraint. Steering behaviors remains extremely useful in many situations. For games that can be represented in two dimensions, context steering offers strong movement guarantees and simple, stateless, decoupled behaviors. A single steering behavior component is asked to return a vector representing its decision, considering the state of the world. This chapter starts with two simple steering behaviors: chase, for approaching targets, and avoid, for not hitting obstacles. The context steering framework deals in the currency of context maps. Internally, the context map is an array of scalar values, with each slot of the array representing a possible heading, and the contents of the slot representing how strongly the behavior feels about this heading. The racing line behavior maps interest all across the track, with a peak around the racing line.
