Rapid Development of Characters in FPS/3PS Games Using Visually-Specified Behavior-based Control

First/third-person simulations in virtual environments have become increasingly used in training; however, creating intelligent, interactive characters to populate these environments presents a large authorial burden. Our work focuses on building tools to enable rapid creation of intelligent characters for first/third-person game-like environments with no programming knowledge required by the user. This is made possible using behavior-based control combined with a user interface employing natural language-like character specification in the form of English sentences and interactive testing during development.