Friendly lords implementing an artificial intelligence social architecture in Mount& Blade II: Bannerlord

• Autor(a) principal: Ricardo, David Cristóvão
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.1/18128
• topic: Arquitectura social; Personagem Não-Jogável; Interação social; Inteligência artificial; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Outras Engenharias e Tecnologias

Despite living in a golden age for video games where there is an increase in the development and popularity of new technologies, such as Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, and constant improvements being made on immersion, either through rich storytelling, high graphical fidelity or even gameplay itself, one area that is generally lacking on innovation is the social interaction of Non-Playable Characters. The credibility of these virtual characters (usually called NPCs) requires that they have human characteristics, such as emotions and the ability to think and make decisions depending on their own will. One of the most important characteristics is the ability to socialize and interact with each other. The main objective of this work was to implement a Social Architecture of Artificial Intel ligence in the game Mount&Blade II: Bannerlord to enhance the credibility of NPCs, making them socially more active and interesting, and improving the User Experience. In the game in which this study takes place (respectively Mount&Blade II: Bannerlord), although there are plenty of NPCs in the world, these are extremely limited, predictable and rarely demonstrate social behaviors. It also addresses some socio-emotional architectures such as CiF and FAtiMA. While FA tiMA is more focused on the generation of emotions, and how those emotions may affect the behaviour of characters, CiF has an explicit representation of social relations between NPCs and how the can influence behaviour. Due to this, the system architecture used as the basis for our model is the CiF architecture, also used before in some popular games like Skyrim and Conan Exiles. It is a system designed to be able to generate social behavior for the social agents, in this case the virtual characters. Instead of looking static and appearing to be clones of each other, the NPCs will appear more natural, making them more interesting and believable from the point of view of social interaction. One of the major differences between the CiF model and the developed model, named Comme il Faut - Bannerlord (CiF-BL), was, respectively, an addition of a centralized component, which will manage about which NPCs will be able to engage in interactions, how many Social Interactions will be able to take place at the same time, when these are started and finished From CiF-BL’s perspective, the player is just another character, and just as NPCs will want to interact with each other, they will also want to interact with the player. To do this work, it was necessary to adapt the game’s existing dialog system to make CiF BL’s changes possible. Adding the options that allow the player to interact socially with an NPC and vice-versa. It was also necessary to adapt and implement another game system, responsible for signaling and informing the most relevant locations and characters. This adaptation was responsible for making it possible to visualize the interactions between the different NPCs. Thus, during the time that the user is present in the virtual world, the virtual characters will no longer have a totally irrelevant and figurative role in the game, and will have a greater social participation. With the goal of appearing more believable, natural, and, to look more like "living beings". The developed model was validated and evaluated through user tests. Unfortunately, due to COVID-19 restrictions that occurred during the execution of this thesis, it was not possible to conduct a controlled in-person evaluation (which would be the ideal way to evaluate our work). Instead, a mod was produced and released online to the Bannerlords player and modding community. The only difference between the mod and the base version of the game was the CIF-BL model used to control the NPCs. The mod was called "Friendly Lords" and released in 18th of August 2021, both in NexusMods and in ModDB. The mod was announced on social networks, such as Reddit, in groups that were related to the game. Participants were voluntarily invited to complete an anonymous questionnaire regarding their gaming experience, and the answers were collected. From the analysis of these same answers, very favorable results were obtained for the objectives we defined. However, overall, the feedback from players and the community has been very positive about the mod and its modifications to the game. Some examples are that it looks promising, that they want active development, and that are grateful to help bring new life to the game. People give suggestions and constructive feedback to implement in the mod and help get a better experience. Meanwhile, some players have shown more interest and offered to collaborate directly in the development, either for more dialogue options between the NPCs, or to translate the mod respectively into Turkish which is the native language of the studio currently developing the game. In short, using the social architecture implemented in the game, the Credibility of NPCs and the Social Presence improved by more than 30%, having successfully achieved the goals. This document describes in more detail the process of researching, implementing and testing the model. To improve this work and the Artificial Intelligence social architecture, it would be necessary to at least add more personality traits and a greater number of different social interactions, for the NPCs to have a greater diversity in terms of their social behavior.