Lethbridge College instructor and START researcher Tyler Heaton sets up new motion capture equipment on Nov. 25, 2022. The equipment comes from a federal grant the START program recieved earlier in the year.
Virtual beings or non-player characters that think and act on their own may be here sooner than you think.
Lethbridge College’s Centre for Spatial Technologies Applied Research and Training or START is looking to give those dull non-player characters (NPCs) in games a lot more personality.
Mike McCready instructor and chair of the START program says it has brought in over 2 million in grants and contracts allowing the program to purchase equipment and hire new staff including Owen Brierley a machine learning researcher with a background on virtual beings.
As chair of research one aspect McCready is tasked with is improving upon training programs called real or applied games. These are generally simulation type games used in things like education, scientific exploration, health care and emergency or police training.
“One tenant of our research is how do we create more and more authentic virtual beings,” says McCready.
That’s where Brierley comes in.
In today’s gaming worlds and spaces most of the interactions with the characters in game are controlled by the program through heavily scripted dialogue. This dialogue often becomes repetitive and choices seem limited very quickly.
Brierley describes it as something equivalent to how in the movie The Truman Show the background actors exhibit strange, bizarre behaviours. In games like Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto, the background characters will sometimes exhibit looping behaviours, or sort of predictable behaviours, or completely bizarre chaotic or random behaviours.
In entertainment video games this is generally fine. You need an element of linear dialogue at times to progress the story and to direct the character.
The types of games being developed by the START program are called serious or applied games.
“A rather complicated and challenging problem is giving these non-player characters the ability to behave in something I call non-deterministic ways,” says Brierley.
Brierley says he uses the term non-deterministic to describe something that’s between the scripted or deterministic path and the completely chaotic or totally random.
They are currently working with the Lethbridge police service to train characters, within a training simulator, with non-deterministic behaviours.
In current iterations of the simulator NPCs have a limited number of actions or behaviours they can exhibit. This limits the training. If a trainee does the same simulation enough times they will run out of possible actions to take. Essentially the computer-controlled NPC has a script, it reads that script, maybe there are changes based on your actions but that script is always the same.
To McCready and Briarley the goal is to be able to give virtual beings a lot more freedom of choice.
What Briarley refers to as the rich inner life of non-player characters.
“You’re essentially giving characters a background and, and a reason to make the choices that they make in games and simulations,” Briarley says.
If we can make non-player characters more human, then we can go beyond just providing a simulation. We can go beyond just providing information, we can engage with people on a very deep, meaningful level.
“I think there’s a natural fit between virtual learning and the entertainment and gaming world, and the potential for characters to adapt to the player and think around them is endless,” says McCready.
We are getting closer but there is still a long way to go. This is just one aspect of what the START program is all about. Trying to give non-player characters more personality and more life so that they feel more real and more engaging.
