Name: Veronica Hage

Title: Online swarm exploration in virtual 3D environments

Abstract

The use of AI-driven or simulation-based testing of games is becoming a more
and more practiced method in the game development industry as present-day
virtual 3D environments become more and more semantically complex. Test
coverage (here defined as a metric of how many game states are reached in a

set of simulation-based tests) in games can be generated by creating interac-
tion between the virtual characters and their virtual environments. This work

aims to explore simulation-based testing of virtual 3D environments by using
swarm intelligence; a field within artificial intelligence where algorithms are
inspired by swarm behaviours observed in the animal kingdom. Four different
agent swarm types (random wandering, repulsive wandering, reactive Lévy
walk and repellent pheromone ants) are evaluated with the strive of finding
robustness and scalability over different types of environments with the goal
of spatial exploration. The experiments are carried out in four different virtual
environments constructed in the game engine Unity3D. Three environments

have simple designs (sparse obstacles, maze and multi-floored) and one en-
vironment have a more complex design (a virtual forest). The methods are

evaluated on: their strengths and weaknesses in terms of spatial coverage over
time in the different environment types and for different agent quantities (10,

50, 100), their dispersion/edge-covering capabilities and how well they pre-
sumably can be applied in the targeted application (game testing systems). The

study finds that the most scalable and robust method of the studied methods

seems to be the random wander behaviour, while the most complex method; re-
pellent pheromone ants, proves very efficient in some environments but less in

others and can be more cumbersome to implement and computationally heavy

to run. Overall, the work can conclude that swarm intelligence can be of inter-
est from a game testing perspective as it could help to increase test coverage

of virtual 3D environments in general simulation-based testing.