Field-based Motion Coordination In Quake 3 Arena

Quake 3 Arena (Q3A) belongs to the kind of firstperson shooter computer games. The player controls a character (bot) fighting against other artificial bot agents. The aim of this paper is to present an approach to the problem of coordinating the movements of a set of Q3A bots. The goals of bots’ coordinated movements can be various: letting them to meet somewhere, distribute accordingly to specific spatial patterns, surround an enemy, or simply move in the environment without interfering with each other. To achieve our goal, we take inspiration from the physical world, i.e., from the way particles in our universe move and globally self-organize accordingly to that contextual information which is represented by gravitational and electro-magnetic fields. In our approach, contextual information is expressed in the form of Co-Fields: distributed data structures implementing the field concept. Each agent of the system can generate and propagate across the Q3A environment specific distributed data structures, conveying application-specific information. Agents can locally perceive these data structures and move e.g. following the fields’ gradient.