PathOS+ is a project exploring the potential of AI agents to stand in for human players in early-stage level testing for games with 3D navigation in a virtual world, alongside expert evaluation.
Samantha Stahlke - Founder
Atiya Nova - Lead Developer
Stevie Sansalone - Research Assistant, Developer
Dr. Pejman Mirza-Babaei - Research Supervisor
PathOS+ is being developed as an open-source framework for Unity. To use PathOS in your project, all you have to do is create some simple markup highlighting interactive objects in your level, and instantiate AI agents to wander around. PathOS+ operates on top of Unity's Navmesh system, and requires no modification to your existing game objects or scripts. Here's a screenshot of the framework in action:
Agents can be customized to reflect different player profiles - for instance, cautious newbies focused on exploration, hardcore completionists, or diehard adrenaline junkies looking for a fight. Agents will navigate based on these profiles, giving you an approximation of how different players will navigate through your game's world.
You can find the manual for PathOS+ here.
The PathOS+ Window (located in Window>PathOS+) has numerous tabs that each serve their own purpose. Here is a brief breakdown of what each one does:
The references to the in-scene PathOS+ Agent, PathOS+ Manager, and Screenshot Manager can be set here.
The values for the selected PathOS+ Agent can be edited here, included their personality values.
The values of enemies/health potions can be set here, along with whether or not the simulation ends on player death.
Multiple agents can be simulate simultaneously here.
Agent personality profiles can be modified here.
The level can be set up here, by using the markup tool to mark the different entities within the level.
Agent playthroughs can be recorded here. They can be loaded in as things such as heatmaps.
The findings during expert evaluation can be recorded in here. They can then be exported into a formatted excel sheet. This also gives an overview of the level map.