Serious computer games have become increasingly popular; they also require more elaborate and natural behavior on the part of Non-Playing Characters. The more elaborate the interactions among characters are during a game, the more difficult it is to design these characters without the use of specialized tools geared towards implementing intelligent agents in a modular way. This thus seems to be an excellent area for the application of intelligent agent technology, which for the past two decades has been developed based on design concepts such as Goals, Intentions, Plans and Beliefs. A first attempt at connecting game engines with these types of agents has been made with Gamebots [1]. Gamebots provides an infrastructure that allows the interfacing of any agent platform to the computer game Unreal Tournament. Gamebots manages the provision of relevant information regarding the game state, while delivering commands for actions from the agents to Unreal. More recently, this package was used as the basis for more extensive middleware called Pogamut [2]. Although the aforementionedmiddleware does allow the interfacing of agents to the game engine, that in itself does not guarantee proper behavior of the agents in the game. In the workshop series on Agents for Games and Simulations [3,4], started in 2009, issues regarding the connection of agent technology to game engines has been discussed. Most of these issues derive from the fact that game engines are typically designed to be in total control of the game’s progress. On the other hand one, of the major attributes of agents developed on MAS platforms is that they are autonomous (to some extent) and interact asynchronously. We want to exploit the benefits of having agents deciding intelligently and autonomously about their next actions, while not losing control of the game. This balancing act leads to three broad categories of issues. The first category is that of technical issues; an important issue in this category is that of coping with real-time environments. Unfortunately, agent technology has hardly bothered with real-time issues up until now. A major exception is the use of agent technology in robotics, where one obviously also has to deal with real-time environments. Maybe this is one of the reasons that, in robotics, people do not use standard (BDI) agent platforms as basis for
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