For your projects that don't just "fake" AI
Game devs often use a sort of "fake" AI system, the idea being that doing just enough to convince the user that the AI is "real" is good enough. And it often is. But what if you want to use a more complex, robust AI personality system that can be used in any kind of project--games, office applications, concierge systems, and pretty much anything else? What if you don't just want to give or take a few points from some arbitrarily determined variable like, well, "LikesMe"? What if you want a system that takes care of not only whether the NPC "likes" me more or less, but also takes into account all the other kinds of personality factors that go with "liking" someone and also whether liking this person makes the NPC that little bit more kind to others? And does this on its own, behind the scenes? Then you'll want the Extreme AI Personality Engine.
Extreme AI v2 enables developers to create personalities for non-player characters that evolve during the course of a game based on interactions and events. Based on the Five-Factor model of personality, Extreme AI breathes life into your NPCs. Note that Extreme AI is "live" during the gameplay itself; NPCs' personalities are modified on the fly as they interact with players, other NPCs, and even the world around them.
Note that Extreme AI is an excellent complement to the IBM Watson Unity SDK--while Watson analyzes data coming in from outside your characters (such as the tone or emotional state of this outside data), ExAI determines how your characters' personalities interact with that data and can help determine responses/your characters' emotional state.
A character's personality changes are individualized; that is, her attitude toward the entity causing the change is changed more than her attitude in general, and she will remember these feelings about that entity (and others) throughout the game. This "attitudinal memory" helps the NPC act realistically; if she is a shopkeeper, she may begin as generally neutral, no real like or dislike for her customers. If a player comes in often and is always nice to her, always polite, her attitude toward that player will change significantly, and her overall feelings towards new customers will skew slightly as well (although not nearly as much). Conversely, if another player starts coming in and is always nasty to her, her attitude toward that second player will change significantly in the opposite direction, and her overall feelings toward strangers will adjust back toward her original feelings (or get worse; she may feel slightly betrayed by her own feelings)--but her attitude toward the first player will continue to be significantly positive.
This "Light" version of Extreme AI has much of the same functionality as the full version, including the ability to save personalities and use the engine in a published game. The Light version differs in the following ways: 11 editable personality emotions/attributes/response types (instead of 39); 14 preset personalities (instead of 28); and no user-created presets. It also lacks any of the advanced methods for viewing raw character data.
Extreme AI can be used in any type of game to tie an NPC's reactions to an underlying personality: RPGs are the most obvious, but the engine can be used in a sports management game to guide the reactions of non-player managers or team members, or in a similar fashion in a game like Civilization, or in a number of other situations. It can be integrated with many other Unity assets, including Rival Theory's RAIN (see our YouTube video demonstrating this using two minotaurs).
Users of ExAI version 1 can upgrade to version 2 for a discount; see the upgrade pricing above. NOTE: If you bought ExAI v1 during 2017, you are entitled to a free upgrade to ExAI v2! See our website for the version differences. Contact us for more information.
The Extreme AI engine is based in part on nearly seven years of research not only into the Five Factor model itself, but also into the correlation between the underlying facets and our 39 chosen emotions/attributes/response types, and into the elasticity of the facets of human personality over time. Our return result range is similar to that used in the actual NEO PI-R test used to rate people using the Five Factor model.
NPC queries return the character’s actual strength of response, based on her personality at that time, how she feels about the person/place/thing with which she is interacting, and taking into account human variability (that is, an exact response is not 100% predictable, as when a generally stubborn person decides to not be quite so stubborn this one time). The variability is not just a random occurrence; it, too, is based on personality factors.
This full version of Extreme AI includes advanced methods allowing the developer to examine a character's raw response type values, the underlying facet values, and individualized adjustments vs specific players and other NPCs, both in-game and through the editor.
Please feel free to download a copy of the user manual and the quickstart guide for more details and examples. You can also ask us a question via our Forums.
