Abstract
Certainly non-player characters (NPCs) can add richness to a game environment. A world without people (or at least humanoids) seems barren and artificial. People are often a major part of the setting of a game. Furthermore, watching NPCs perform and have a life outside of their interactions with the main character makes them appear more reasonable and believable. NPCs can also be used to move forward the storyline of a game or provide emotional elements. Authoring NPCs can, however, be very laborious. At present, games either have a limited number of character profiles or are meticulously hand scripted. We describe an architecture, called CAROSA (Crowds with Aleatoric, Reactive, Opportunistic, and Scheduled Actions), that facilitates the creation of heterogeneous populations by using Microsoft Outlook®, a Parameterized Action Representation (PAR), and crowd simulator. The CAROSA framework enables the specification and control of actions for more realistic background characters, links human characteristics and high level behaviors to animated graphical depictions, and relieves some of the burden in creating and animating heterogeneous 3D animated human populations.
Keywords
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Bates, B.: Game Design. Course Technology PTR (2004)
Bindiganavale, R., Schuler, W., Allbeck, J., Badler, N., Joshi, A., Palmer, M.: Dynamically altering agent behaviors using natural language instructions. In: Autonomous Agents, pp. 293–300. AAAI, Menlo Park (2000)
Brockington, M.: Level-of-detail ai for a large role-playing game. In: Rabin, S. (ed.) AI Game Programming Wisdom, pp. 419–425. Charles River Media, Inc., Hingham (2002)
DePaiva, D.C., Vieira, R., Musse, S.R.: Ontology-based crowd simulation for normal life situations. In: Proceedings of Computer Graphics International, pp. 221–226. IEEE, Stony Brook (2005)
GeniusConnect, http://www.geniusconnect.com/articles/products/2/3/ (last visited May 2009)
Lee, K.H., Choi, M.G., Hong, Q., Lee, J.: Group behavior from video: A data-driven approach to crowd simulation. In: ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation, San Diego, pp. 109–118 (2007)
Lerner, A., Fitusi, E., Chrysanthou, Y., Cohen-Or, D.: Fitting behaviors to pedestrian simulations. In: Symposium on Computer Animation, pp. 199–208. ACM, New Orleans (2009)
Massive Software Inc.: 3d animation system for crowd-related visual effects, http://www.massivesoftware.com (last visited August 2010)
McDonnell, R., Micheal, L., Hernandez, B., Rudomin, I., O’Sullivan, C.: Eye-catching crowds: saliency based selective variation. In: ACM SIGGRAPH, pp. 1–10. ACM, New Orleans (2009)
Pelechano, N., Allbeck, J., Badler, N.: Virtual Crowds: Methods, Simulation, and Control. Synthesis Lectures on Computer Graphics and Animation. Morgan and Claypool Publishers, San Rafael (2008)
Sanchez-Ruiz, A., Llanso, D., Gomez-Martin, M., Gonzalez-Calero, P.: Authoring behaviour for characters in games reusing abstracted plan traces. In: Ruttkay, Z., Kipp, M., Nijholt, A., Vilhjalmsson, H. (eds.) IVA 2009. LNCS, vol. 5773, pp. 56–62. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Sung, M., Gleicher, M., Chenney, S.: Scalable behaviors for crowd simulation. Computer Graphics Forum 23(3), 519–528 (2004)
Yu, Q., Terzopoulos, D.: A decision network framework for the behavioral animation of virtual humans. In: Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation, pp. 119–128. Eurographics Association, San Diego (2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Allbeck, J.M. (2010). CAROSA: A Tool for Authoring NPCs. In: Boulic, R., Chrysanthou, Y., Komura, T. (eds) Motion in Games. MIG 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6459. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16958-8_18
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16958-8_18
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-16957-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-16958-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)