Modelling Fish Behaviour

Abstract

This paper studies the problem of creating artificial fish for real-time interactive virtual worlds aimed at desktop environments with hardware 3D support. The artificial fish developed have the ability to move, sense and think. Each fish is modelled with a Keyframed skeletal animated body, semi-physics based movement model, sensory abilities, internal motivations, a set of behaviour routines, and a behavioural selection mechanism. These features allow the fish to act autonomously using behavioural rules in response to sensory input from the environment and other fish. This autonomous ability enables definite behaviours to be described and observed in the fish that are not simply random, cyclic or scripted. Excellent work has been previously done on modelling sophisticated artificial fish. The contribution of this paper is to focus on the practical modelling of fish for game production.