The University of Alberta AI Scripting Research Group

Developer Resources

nwnintf, a package of Java classes including: Classes for reading and writing NWN file formats. Aurora GUI widget classes. Descriptions of Aurora file formats.

Creating realistic artificially-intelligent characters is seen as one of the major challenges of the commercial games industry. Historically, character behavior has been specified using simple finite state machines and, more recently, by AI scripting languages. These languages are relatively "simple", in part because the language has to serve three user communities: game designers, game programmers, and consumers -- each with different levels of programming experience. The scripting often becomes unwieldy, given that potentially hundreds (thousands) of characters need to be defined, the characters need non-trivial behaviors, and the characters have to interface with the plot constraints. We are investigating techniques for AI scripting using BioWare's game Neverwinter Nights as a testbed. We have developed libraries to read and write the Neverwinter Nights file formats, and have duplicated some functionality of the Neverwinter Nights Aurora Toolset. See our Neverwinter Resources page for more information.