About ScriptEase

Creating realistic artificially-intelligent characters is seen as one of the major challenges of the commercial games industry. Historically, character behaviour 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 behaviours, and the characters have to interface with the plot constraints.

We are currently developing a model for AI scripting called ScriptEase. The model is pattern template based, allowing designers to quickly build complex behaviours without doing explicit programming. The first version of ScriptEase generates scripting code for BioWare's Neverwinter Nights game. We are currently working on four different kinds of patterns: encounter, behaviour, dialogue and quest. The current release of ScriptEase for NWN supports all four pattern types.