Flexible and Purposeful NPC Behaviors using Real-Time Genetic Control

There is an increasing need in modern computer games for non-player characters (NPCs) with robust behaviors that achieve game objectives while appearing flexible and believable to the human players interacting with those NPCs. Evolutionary approaches to game artificial intelligence (game AI) have produced successful results for complex game winning strategies, realistic behavior patterns for groups of simulated entities, and more. However, there has been relatively little effort on evolutionary techniques for producing rich NPC behaviors for interaction with human players. To explore whether evolutionary mechanisms can support real-time control of NPCs to produce flexible and purposeful behavior, we present our initial efforts at integrating a genetic algorithm based robotic controller with an off-the-shelf game to control one or more NPCs dynamically. We describe the integration effort and our initial observations, and discuss our plan for achieving richer NPC control and for performing more detailed analysis of the behaviors of the resulting NPCs.