NPC stands for non-playable character, the term means the characters/creatures that are greneratged by the game that the player/s can not play, the game it self controls the NPC’s.
This is an example of two NPC’s from the game Guild Wars.
The core tasks of an NPC is (if you take a humanoid kind creature that can talk as a example) to synchonization of synthetic speech and gestures, the expession of emotion and some personaliy as to the body movement and facial display.
For the NPC’s to move like this and to move intelligenly, identify hiding posions or even generally analyse the 3D topology the NPC requires certain data, this data must cover these:
It must IDENTIFY ALL POTENIAL LOACTIONS FROM WHERE AN ENEMY CAN EASYLY SHOOT AND HIDE.
Accurate world navigation is also know as Path-finding.
Accurate world navigation (path-finding) is subdivided in two main categories, they are called world navigation and local navigation, World natigation way of understand rooms, door and the genral geography is to work out a way to get a player or character from point 1 to point 2 and so on in the world. understanding the world can be very complex and many solutions have been attempted, one of the solutions has been that NPCs follow a pre-processed map that has been built in general terms using the original map floors. the pro process detects floor pieces, which has been flagged as such by its map builder, and builds itself into a simlified map of the world with just the floors, so that the NPCs cannot approach the walls as they are following the map of the floor.
Now there is Local navigation, we may have a rount to get our NPCs from where he is in the world and where he thinks he heard a noise but you cannot just follow this and expect great looking results. Paths of this nature tend to be very specific for a given purpose. When you are running through corridors from one room to another it is fine, but if you are trying to guide him around a large room, the path node approach tends to end up with some weird looking path-finding. These routes are also not dynamic. Because they are pre-built, they do not tend to take into account any dynamic changes in the world. Tables may have been moved, chairs destroyed, walls have been blasted in and, of course, people move. This is where local navigation differs from world navigation. It has to take into account the local world and navigate the NPC through it. It has to know what is around, what paths exist that it can take and decide which one to take.
Filed under: Games Research
