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Exploration in NetHack using occupancy maps

Published: 14 August 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Roguelike games generally feature exploration problems as a critical, yet often repetitive element of gameplay. Automated approaches, however, face challenges in terms of optimality. This paper presents an approach to exploration of roguelike dungeon environments. Our design, based on the concept of occupancy maps popular in robotics, aims to minimize exploration time, balancing coverage with resource cost. Through extensive experimentation on NetHack maps we show that this technique is significantly more efficient than simpler greedy approaches. Results point towards better automation for players as well as heuristics for fully automated gameplay.

References

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Muntasir Chowdhury and Clark Verbrugge. 2016. Exhaustive Exploration Strategies for NPCs. In Proceedings of the 1st International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG: 7th Workshop on Procedural Content Generation.
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Héctor H. Gonzàlez-Baños and Jean-Claude Latombe. 2002. Navigation Strategies for Exploring Indoor Environments. International Journal of Robotics Research 21, 10--11 (2002), 829--848.
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J. Hagelbäck and S. J. Johansson. 2008. Dealing with fog of war in a Real Time Strategy game environment. In Computational Intelligence in Games. 55--62.
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Damián Isla. 2005. Probabilistic Target-Tracking and Search Using Occupancy Maps. In AI Game Programming Wisdom 3. Charles River Media.
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Damián Isla. 2013. Third Eye Crime: Building a Stealth Game Around Occupancy Maps. (2013). Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment.
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Miguel Juliá, Arturo Gil, and Oscar Reinoso. 2012. A comparison of path planning strategies for autonomous exploration and mapping of unknown environments. Autonomous Robots 33, 4 (2012), 427--444.
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S. Koenig, C. Tovey, and W. Halliburton. 2001. Greedy mapping of terrain. In IEEE Int Conf Robot Autom, Vol. 4. 3594--3599.
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S. M. LaValle. 2006. Planning Algorithms. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K. Available at http://planning.cs.uiuc.edu/.
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Hans Moravec. 1988. Sensor Fusion in Certainty Grids for Mobile Robots. AI Magazine 9, 2 (July 1988), 61--74.
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Hans Moravec and A. E. Elfes. 1985. High Resolution Maps from Wide Angle Sonar. In IEEE Int Conf Robot Autom. 116--121.
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NetHack Wiki. 2016. Comestible --- NetHack Wiki. https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Comestible. (2016).
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B. Yamauchi. 1997. A frontier-based approach for autonomous exploration. In CIRA. 146--151.

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  • (2019)Exploration in NetHack With Secret DiscoveryIEEE Transactions on Games10.1109/TG.2018.286175911:4(363-373)Online publication date: Dec-2019

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FDG '17: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games
August 2017
545 pages
ISBN:9781450353199
DOI:10.1145/3102071
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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  • Microsoft: Microsoft
  • Massive Entertainment: Massive Entertainment

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 14 August 2017

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Author Tags

  1. exploration
  2. occupancy maps
  3. roguelikes

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  • Poster

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FDG'17
Sponsor:
  • Microsoft
  • Massive Entertainment

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FDG '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 36 of 89 submissions, 40%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 152 of 415 submissions, 37%

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  • (2019)Exploration in NetHack With Secret DiscoveryIEEE Transactions on Games10.1109/TG.2018.286175911:4(363-373)Online publication date: Dec-2019

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