Diverse Shortest Paths in Game Maps: A Comparative User Study and Experiments

Computing diverse shortest paths requires finding a set of k alternative paths (including the shortest path) between a given source s and a target t. Intuitively, these paths should be significantly different from each other and meaningful/natural (e.g., must not contain loops or unnecessary detours). While finding diverse shortest paths (also called alternative paths) in road networks has been extensively studied, to the best of our knowledge, we are the first to formally study alternative pathfinding in game maps which are typically represented as Euclidean planes containing polygonal obstacles. First, we adapt the existing techniques designed for road networks to find alternative paths in the game maps. Then, we design a web-based system that allows the users to visualise the alternative paths generated by these existing approaches in different maps. Finally, we use this web-based system to conduct a user study that shows that the existing road network approaches generate high-quality alternative paths when adapted for the game maps. Furthermore, we also evaluate the quality of alternative paths returned by existing approaches using some well-known quantitative measures on a widely used game maps benchmark.