Towards Autonomous Characters for Interactive Media

2000

Questo articolo illustra brevemente un'architettura per implementare agenti autonomi intelligenti che agiscono in un mondo virtuale creato per un videogioco e possono interagire con esso tramite operazioni di pianificazione in un ambiente dinamico e non completamente osservabile. In particolare, è in corso di sviluppo un'architettura ad agenti di tipo verticale, progettata per consentire agli agenti di interagire con un ambiente complesso. Tale architettura si basa su tre livelli di astrazione (situato, strategico e deliberativo), ma è stata progettata per essere facilmente generalizzata ad N livelli, in funzione dell'ambiente operativo e della complessità degli obiettivi da raggiungere. Ciascun livello controlla il sottostante, in modo tale che il comportamento dell'agente sia governato da una chiara organizzazione gerarchica. This paper briefly describes an architecture for implementing intelligent autonomous agents that "live" in a virtual world created for a computer game, and must interact with it by suitably planning and executing in a dynamic and not-completely accessible environment. In particular, we are currently working on a two-pass vertically layered architecture, designed to deal with a complex environment. Such an architecture is currently based on three levels of abstraction (i.e., situated, strategic and deliberative), but has been designed for being easily generalized to a N-levels architecture, depending on the given environment and task complexity. Each layer controls the underlying one, so that an agent behavior is supported by a clean hierarchical organization.

ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2002

The ability to learn is a potentially compelling and important quality for interactive synthetic characters. To that end, we describe a practical approach to real-time learning for synthetic characters. Our implementation is grounded in the techniques of reinforcement learning and informed by insights from animal training. It simpli-Þes the learning task for characters by (a) enabling them to take advantage of predictable regularities in their world, (b) allowing them to make maximal use of any supervisory signals, and (c) making them easy to train by humans.

International School and Symposium on Advanced Distributed Systems, 2004

This paper presents VIBES (Virtual Behaviours), a behavioural animation system for generic humanoid characters within dynamic virtual worlds. This system is based on stand-alone hierarchical behavioural modules. Each module performs a given task according to the perception of the virtual agent it belongs to. The main originality of VIBES is to combine Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life techniques in order

2002

Abstract In this paper, we describe a method for implementing the behaviour of artificial actors in the context of interactive storytelling. We have developed a fully implemented prototype based on the Unreal Tournament™ game engine, and carried experiments with a simple sitcom-like scenario. We discuss the central role of artificial actors in interactive storytelling and how real-time generation of their behaviour participates in the creation of a dynamic storyline.

In this document we describe a life-like character Bouncy, which has been constructed in conjunction with a prototype developed for the STAGING project 1 .

IEEE Intelligent Systems, 2006

1998

Since a few years, the terms of virtual, synthetic or digital actors have been extensively used in order to describe very different kinds of entities. The term “actor” is well-known in the world of cinema and everybody knows it. A Hollywood-like actor is first a human personality. In the context of software, an actor as introduced by Hewitt [1] in 1971 is essentially an object that can send or receive messages. According to Greif and Hewitt [2], actors are defined by their behavior, whatever their shape: a cube that is able to jump by itself and avoid obstacles without intervention of the animator may be also defined as a virtual actor, because it is virtual and because it is able to behave itself.

IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games, 2017

Creating interactive characters is one of the most challenging tasks of videogame design. In order to facilitate such an endeavour, we introduce a decisional and behaviour synthesis architecture integrated in the game engine Unity3D. A distinguishing feature of this architecture is that it embraces embodied cognition principles and uses them as implementation requirements. From these we derive an architecture which is based on a novel combination of previously proposed systems, together with some simplifications. We also argue that the architecture proposed has propertiesmodularity, scalability, stability-which can be beneficial for its practical industrial adoption, particularly in the context of the recent improvement in machine learning techniques. Artificial intelligence is a quite technical domain, and we believe such a tool can facilitate interactive character creation by creative minds in industrial applications.

1997

This paper describes research undertaken while developing an interactive game based on a children's science fiction film. The aim of the project is to develop artificial intelligence agents as characters in the game world which interact with the player around various predetermined scenarios. We describe the development of a representation for agent attributes, and how they affect on-going moods and changing relationships between agents during the game.

2004

We are creating an environment for investigating the role of advanced AI in interactive, story-based computer games. This environment is based on the Unreal Tournament (UT) game engine and the Soar AI engine. Unreal provides a 3D virtual environment, while Soar provides a flexible architecture for developing complex AI characters. This paper describes our progress to date, starting with our game, Haunt 2, which is designed so that complex AI characters will be critical to the success (or failure) of the game. It addresses design issues with constructing a plot for an interactive storytelling environment, creating synthetic characters for that environment, and using a story director agent to tell the story with those characters.