Generating Ambient Behaviors in Computer Role-Playing Games

To compete in today´s market, companies that develop computer role-playing games (CRPGs) must quickly and reliably create realistic, engaging game stories. Indeed, intricate storylines and realism that goes beyond graphics have become major product differentiators. To establish both, it´s essential that companies use AI to create nonplayer characters (NPCs) that exhibit near-realistic ambient behaviors. Doing so offers players a rich background tapestry that makes the game more entertaining. Because storylines must come first, however, NPCs that aren´t critical to the plot are often added at the end of the game development cycle - if resources are available. To control NPCs´ ambient behaviors, many computer games use custom scripts. Story authors must therefore write computer code fragments for the game world´s hundreds or thousands of NPCs. Our approach lets game authors use generative behavior patterns to create scripts of complex NPC behaviors and interactions. To build these patterns; they use our publicly available ScriptEase tool, which lets them create game stories using a high-level, menu-driven programming model