Navigation and Exploration in 3D-Game Automated Play Testing

TL;DR

This paper explores how geometry and graph-based pathfinding can be used to automate navigation and exploration in 3D game testing, addressing the challenges posed by complex virtual worlds.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining geometric and graph-based methods for automated navigation in 3D game testing environments.

Findings

Proposed a new navigation framework for 3D game testing

Demonstrated the feasibility of automated exploration in virtual worlds

Discussed implementation details of the approach

Abstract

To enable automated software testing, the ability to automatically navigate to a state of interest and to explore all, or at least sufficient number of, instances of such a state is fundamental. When testing a computer game the problem has an extra dimension, namely the virtual world where the game is played on. This world often plays a dominant role in constraining which logical states are reachable, and how to reach them. So, any automated testing algorithm for computer games will inevitably need a layer that deals with navigation on a virtual world. Unlike e.g. navigating through the GUI of a typical web-based application, navigating over a virtual world is much more challenging. This paper discusses how concepts from geometry and graph-based path finding can be applied in the context of game testing to solve the problem of automated navigation and exploration. As a proof of concept, the paper also briefly discusses the implementation of the proposed approach.