CAROSA: A Tool for Authoring NPCs
Jan M. Allbeck
In Proceedings of Motion in Games. Springer, 2010, pages 182-193. .
Abstract
Certainly non-player characters (NPCs) can add richness to
a game environment. A world without people (or at least humanoids)
seems barren and arti cial. 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 pro les 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(R), a Parameterized Action Representation (PAR), and crowd simulator. The CAROSA framework enables the speci cation 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.
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