Abstract

Open-world games strongly restrict gaming environment, either because of technical limitations or in-game limitations imposed by game linearity. Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning frequently used in simulated virtual world, restricting the plan-space to finite and ensuring decision-making is limited by scalability, especially when high situation variability is desirable. We developed a late-binding planning technique that ensures situational diversity and is still scalable enough to run practical simulation systems. This technique enables any partially ordered set of functionally interrelated events to be defined as composite events, suggesting layered organization. It is a two-level planning, involving inter- and intra-event dimensions for functional forms, which are dynamically channeled into multi-event situations against the common background. We first analyzed the viability of a functional language based on our approach with respect to situational variability and scalability over a constraint language as HTN, and demonstrated its feasibility by implementing a composite scenario.