A Proposal for an Agent Architecture for Proactive Persistent Non Player Characters

In the past, games development has been driven by the need to achieve more realistic graphics. This has resulted in a situation today with games set in visually stunning, and almost photo realistic worlds being the norm. As game developers seek something new to make their games stand out from the rest, artificial intelligence is playing a far more important role in game design than before. The most obvious application of AI to games is in creating Non Player Characters (NPCs). Although visually stunning worlds have been created for computer games, the NPCs inhabiting these worlds are most often shallow and uninteresting. This paper will introduce the idea of Proactive Persistent NPCs, that is NPCs that are always modelled (at least to some extent) even when the human player is not in their vicinity. We will consider the issues involved in creating these persistent characters, and propose an intelligent agent architecture which will allow the creation of realistic, interesting and robust characters.