Behavioural A.I.

Topic: Behavioural A.I. - The relationship between Non Playing Characters and Avatars.
Hi Flemming

To explain our project I will stage an example:
A player walks into a shop in the arrival hall. The player slaps the shop assistant and pisses the assistant off. He then walks out of the shop and momentarily returns to the shop and approaches the assistant again. The assistant greets him as if nothing had happened.

This example is very common among MMO games, and we would like to work with this topic. The behaviour of NPCs in the game.
We are currently researching how human remember and store behavioural relationships with other people. This research should hopefully give us a list of parameters on what to store in a NPC memory.
We know that these parameters needs to be as few as possible in order to limit the use of data storage within the game, but still enough parameters to create a dynamic relationship between the NPCs and the avatar.


What do we want from you?
In order to get synchronized it would be nice to hear how far you are in this specific area?

-For instance do you have anything in the parameter selection area?

-Furthermore it would help us a lot if you have any A.I. programming approach on this matter. We know the basic, but we could definitely use all your expertice and previous work within this matter.


Cheers and thanks

Grp. 691:
Daniel Stephansen
Ronni Sørensen
Mads Møller
Tomas Bøttern

Great to have you guys with us !

Despite wet dreams of 11 million or more users on our system, I am not particularly afraid of the use of harddisk space, as long as you calculate it. Harddrive have really become cheap and exceptionally huge in the last few years. A simple memory of the player and mood that player sets the NPC in, would literally only take two bytes, times a few million users, its still no problem at all. So, I would conclude that its better to have a great system than a memory efficient one.

The problem could then be the memory. But thats not the case either, since for a non-action action like this, you would look up the data in a database and thus not use much memory. But it is only possible of course, because this is a typical millisecond delayed action, as the client brings forth the conversation. So no worries, make a great system, then if necessary cut of the less important features.

I have been thinking about what kind of mental abilities characters and NPCs should have. Abilities like anticipation, aggression, composure, concentration, decision, determination, consistency, intimidation and leadership might come into play. The aim of the game is move the focus a little bit away from the violence and into a more intelligent field challenging the mind of the player. I could see different reaction patterns based on this.