NPC AI System Based on Gameplay Recordings
Name
Sercan Altundaş
Abstract
A well optimized Non-Player Character (NPC) as an opponent or a teammate is a major part of the multiplayer games. Most of the game bots are built upon a rigid system with numbered decisions and animations. Experienced players can distinguish bots from hu-man players and they can predict bot movements and strategies. This reduces the quality of the gameplay experience. Therefore, multiplayer game players favour playing against human players rather than NPCs. VR game market and VR gamers are still a small frac-tion of the game industry and multiplayer VR games suffer from loss of their player base if the game owners cannot find other players to play with. This study demonstrates the applicability of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system based on gameplay recordings for a Virtual Reality (VR) First-person Shooter (FPS) game called Vrena. The subject game has an uncommon way of movement, in which the players use grappling hooks to navigate. To imitate VR players’ movements and gestures an AI system is developed which uses gameplay recordings as navigation data. The system contains three major functionality. These functionalities are gameplay recording, data refinement, and navigation. The game environment is sliced into cubic sectors to reduce the number of positional states and gameplay is recorded by time intervals and actions. Produced game logs are segmented into log sections and these log sections are used for creating a look-up table. The lookup table is used for navigating the NPC agent and the decision mechanism followed a way similar to the state-action-reward concept. The success of the developed tool is tested via a survey, which provided substantial feedback for improving the system.
Graduation Thesis language
English
Graduation Thesis type
Master - Software Engineering
Supervisor(s)
Margus Luik
Defence year
2018