One of the innovative features of the VECTOR environment is the use of  intelligent agents with an integrated computational emotion model that can generate the overall dialog and behaviors of non-player characters (NPCs). The intelligent agents that generate these NPC behaviors are constructed using the commercially available version of CHI Systems’ intelligent agent construction toolset, iGEN™.

The iGEN™-controlled intelligent agents generate NPC behaviors using a generic scripting language.  Cultural rules are encoded and mapped to scenario-specific NPC dialog and behaviors.  This provides a set of virtual NPC’s with which the trainee can interact.  Additionally, the NPC model contains an emotional model that modulates NPC dialog and actions based on underlying trainee actions and dialog.  Future areas of VECTOR development will include use of NPC emotional state to drive real-time facial animation of NPC avatars, deepening the scenario to encode additional sets of cultural rule support, and adding additional features to the NPC emotion model.

The emotional variables are controlled by a set of (culture-specific) mappings that take output from the dialog manager, and from events in the environment and apply corresponding adjustments to one or more of these variables.  The mechanism can be elaborated to include excitatory and inhibitory effects between emotional variables, as well as saturation levels and a decay curve. The emotional state (i.e., vector of emotional variables) influences the triggering, priority, and execution of cognitive tasks that generate behaviors and dialog from the intelligent agents.