An Elaborated Goal Production Module for Implementing a Virtual Inhabitant

Abstract

A Virtual Inhabitant is a kind of believable agent proposed to endow attractive features of human-controlled characters, especially the diverse behaviors, to the computer-controlled characters. To behave diversely, goal production module of a Virtual Inhabitant should be designed to produce wide variety of goals semi-automatically which are fit for general situations in contrast to the previous character’s goal production models which are devised for handling very restricted situation based on fixed form goal description methods such as script, state-machine. In this paper, we elaborate the goal production module by categorizing diverse drive stimuli, devising extending and matching methods for those stimuli, and introducing additional methods for supporting the features stressed in psychological field and habitual/routine behavior of a Virtual Inhabitant. We expect that the proposed goal production module can be used for the characters in the open-ended games, on-line games, virtual communities, and so on.