Tony Dujardin

Behavior Design of Game Character's Agent

In human-level simulations, like video games can be, the design of characters behaviors has an important impact on simulation realism. We propose to divide it into a reasoning part, dedicated to a planner, and an individuality part, assigned to an action selection mechanism. Applying the separation of declarative and procedural aspects, the principle is to provide every characters agent with the same procedural mechanisms: the planner and the action selection mechanism. Declarative knowledge is then used at the agent level to individualize the behavior. The contribution of this paper consists in a motivation based action selection mechanism that allows individualization in behavior. The modularity provided by the motivations enables a large variety of behaviors for which the designer has to choose parameters. If the simulation of characters are our first motivation, the principles involved in the proposed motivation based action mechanism are general enough to be used in other contexts.In human-level simulations, like video games can be, the design of characters behaviors has an important impact on simulation realism. We propose to divide it into a reasoning part, dedicated to a planner, and an individuality part, assigned to an action selection mechanism. Applying the separation of declarative and procedural aspects, the principle is to provide every characters agent with the same procedural mechanisms: the planner and the action selection mechanism. Declarative knowledge is then used at the agent level to individualize the behavior. The contribution of this paper consists in a motivation based action selection mechanism that allows individualization in behavior. The modularity provided by the motivations enables a large variety of behaviors for which the designer has to choose parameters. If the simulation of characters are our first motivation, the principles involved in the proposed motivation based action mechanism are general enough to be used in other contexts.

Définir des individualités pour des personnages non joueurs

Designing the behaviour of non player characters (NPC), in role-playing video games, is a hard problem both from the programming point of view and from behaviour modelling considerations. We tackle these hurdles with the interaction oriented approach, promoted by the IODA-CoCoA project. It enables us to propose a generic engine suitable to several contexts. This engine is combined with an action selection mechanism based on motivations. This mechanism provides means to define several NPC behaviours by tuning the motivation parameters without new programming code. Our proposition constitutes a behavioural engine dedicated to the modelling of situated character behaviour. Thanks to its genericity, this engine can be used in various environment (ie games) and for various agents, since it adapts to individual specificities and abilities while proposing a diversity in designed behaviours.