Understanding Everything NPCs Can Do

Understanding Everything NPCs Can Do: Metrics for Action Similarity in Non-Player Characters

Balint, J.T. (TU Delft Computer Graphics and Visualisation)
Allbeck, Jan M. (George Mason University)
Bidarra, Rafael (TU Delft Computer Graphics and Visualisation)

2018

Non-Player Characters (NPCs) have actions that allow them to reason about what they can do in a game and how they can do it. The background information about what they can do are the components of the action, and how they can do it is the form or shape of an action, which may be built up from several sub- actions. The components and shape of an action must be fully defined in a game, which can be tedious when several similar actions are needed. Furthermore, as the number of nuanced actions grows, more pressure is placed on an already constrained reasoning system. By discovering the similarities between actions an NPC can do, a given action set can be intelligently organized with similar components being generalized using an action taxonomy. To understand the similarity between actions we have developed measures of action similarity based on their constituent components and form. From this, we
discover a metric to determine the generalization ability of an organization strategy for an NPC action set. We examine the use of our measures on a previously developed action set to show the nuances between those actions. Lastly, we find that intelligently organizing actions has a positive effect on virtual character reasoning abilities.

Artificial Intelligence in Games
Reasoning
Behavior Organization

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:f2f896ab-618e-42ff-be0e-c7c46b975b30

https://doi.org/10.1145/3235765.3235776

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), New York, NY

2019-02-07

978-1-4503-6571-0

FDG'18: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games

FDG 2018, 2018-08-07 → 2018-08-10, Malmo, Sweden

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2018 J.T. Balint, Jan M. Allbeck, Rafael Bidarra