Supporting path switching for non-player characters in a virtual environment

Abstract

Realistic non-player characters (NPC) are an important component of virtual environments. However, generating NPCs with humanlike behaviour can be difficult. A previously proposed pipeline used evacuation simulators to generate domain relevant NPC behaviour for virtual environments. However, the NPCs generated through this process had static behaviours and could not dynamically change pre-computed evacuation paths. In this paper, we extend this pipeline with an approach that supports path switching for NPCs in four situations and demonstrates the pipeline in a virtual environment modelled on a large real building. A scalability test on the large building showed overall evacuation time in both source evacuation simulator and target virtual environment was consistent regardless of building size and complexity. Three test-cases demonstrate path switching for NPCs with increasing evacuation success rates through different situations. The reuse of static paths to enable dynamic NPC behaviour supports ongoing work to develop low cost and realistic training systems using game engine technology.