Pogamut2 Faculty of Mathematics and Physics Charles University in Prague 11/2008 Platform for research, development and education in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligent virtual agents (IVA)

Content ● Intelligent Virtual Agents – Who they are and why we should care about them? ● Programming basics concerning IVA (or bots) ● Platform Pogamut – Overview – Architecture a IDE – Work with Pogamut, examples

Intelligent Virtual Agents I ● Who they are? – Autonomous computer programs – Their goal – to imitate human behavior and to react adequately to human acts – Part of them – virtual reprezentation of the body in the environemnt provided by computer application ● Examples – In computer games, virtual dramas – Now also in serious games and applications ● FearNot - ● Tactical Iraqi -

Intelligent Virtual Agents II Projekt Facade – interactive drama Unreal Tournament 2004 – computer game

Why IVA? ● Education – Virtual agents as „tutors“ – Simulation of crisis scenarios (Tactical Iraqi) ● Research – Social interactions, cooperation... ● Entertainment – With better IVA it is more fun to play...

Bots – two basic things ● Navigation points, graph ● Floor coverage – Rectangles, circles – NavMesh ● Visibility matrix ● Doors, elevators, switches, special points.... ● If-then rules ● FSM ● Fuzzy logic ● Planning – Traditional – Reactive – „Anytime“ planning EnvironmentLogic

Environment of UT

Environment of UT – representation

Edges and tagging ● Reachability – Running / jumping – Flying ● Point tags – Item – Danger – Additional stuff –...

Floor coverage – circles

Navigation mesh (NavMesh)

Visibility matrix – where to hide ● Bit matrix – visible / invisible (hidden) ● Each row, column is a bit vector – we can use logic operators (AND, OR...)

From navigation to logic ● Finite state machines – Supported often by computer game itself (UT 2004) ● Reactive planners – (S)POSH ● If-then rules, fuzzy ● Genetic approach ● „Smart“ environments – Part of decision making hidden in the environment (afordances) – Path finding, additional information ● Harder with team cooperation

Pogamut 2 GameBots 2004 Unreal Tournament 2004 NetBeans IDE Unreal Tournament 2004 GameBots NetBeans

● Pogamut – platform for – Research (GRID) – Development – Education (MFF) ● Agents live in the environment of the game UT 2004 ● Pogamut is in Java, it's extensible and modular ● Features powerfull IDE (NetBeans plugin) – for debugging and visualization of the agent's inner state ● Pogamut is free* and open source ● Part of the project is the web – includes documentation, instaler, video tutorials, forum and FAQ Pogamut 2 – overview – in the field of artificial intelligence and intelligent virtual agents

UT 2004 ● Extensible 3D environment

Pogamut 2 – architecture World simulatorSends information to the agent Translates text messages to Java objects Agent (bot) sends actions

Pogamut 2 – IDE

IDE – remote control

IDE – Introspection

Agent Start prePrepareAgent() postPrepareAgent() doLogic() shutdownAgent()

Agent – doLogic() ● Called repeatedly (~ 6 Hz)

Pogamut 2 – example ● FollowBot ● Video

Pogamut 2 – example ● Shooting FollowBot

The end... Questions?