Game AI Pro 2

Chapter 3

Dual-Utility Reasoning

Kevin Dill

3.1 Introduction

Utility-based approaches to decision making examine the situation in the game at the moment a decision is being made, calculate the goodness (which is often called things like utility, priority, weight, or score) of each option using a heuristic function, and then drive decision making using that value. This can be contrasted against purely Boolean decision-making approaches, such as the typical finite state machine (FSM) or behavior tree, which evaluate a series of black-or-white, yes-or-no questions in order to select an option for execution.

The advantage of utility-based AI is that it is better able to account for the subtle nuance of the situation when making its decision. In ...