Event-Centric Control for Background Agents

This paper describes a framework for controlling the varied activities of groups of background characters (representing extras or supernumeraries). Our platform is built upon an event-centric agent control model, which shifts behavior authoring from writing complex reactive agents to authoring particular activities. This approach allows us to achieve diverse, complex, and collaborative activities while the agents themselves stay simple and generic. An event is defined generically on agent roles, and can be dispatched to any set of agents that can fill those roles. This allows us to control macro-level group behavior with a centralized entity called the Group Coordinator that dispatches events to agents based on their situational and locational context (which can be controlled by an author). What results a structure for controlling macroscopic behavior for groups of background agents.