A Web Services Approach to Generating and Using Plans in Configurable Execution Environments

Abstract

The computational scope of artificial intelligence in games has traditionally been limited by the processing requirements of the game engine's graphics and physics components. The emerging genre of interactive narrative typically relies upon AI planning systems that perform computation too demanding to integrate into commercial games. This thesis describes Zocalo, a collection of service-oriented applications, in which a planning Web service generates interactive storylines for story-based games and interactive narratives. The interfaces of the planning services allow for usage scenarios ranging from simple to complex. We describe the use of planning services both for run-time construction of narrative plans and for design-time iterative specification of game contents.

Zocalo facilitates the execution of plans in commercial game engines with only small modifications to the original games. It provides for the execution of story plans in numerous situations, automatically adjusting the state of the game's environment so that it is compatible with the beginning of the story. The plan execution functionality of Zocalo is intended for gaming environments but can also be applied to other applications in need of narratives.