ABSTRACT

Spatio-temporal reasoning is an important part of many decisions. It is how armies know where to place gun nests, prisons know where to place cameras, firemen know where to place firebreaks, cities know where to place highways, and malls know where to place stores. This chapter focuses on the temporal aspect of spatio-temporal reasoning. Defending a location is a common scenario in games that include any amount of strategic planning, such as tower defense games, strategy games, and "hold out until help arrives" missions in first-person shooters or action games. If a spatio-temporal problem can be converted to a spatial one, it can leverage that hardware. An affordance is something that affords an action. More importantly, it suggests an action. The term path gap is used to refer to the difference between when a group on one path reaches a position versus when a group on a second path reaches it.