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.

With the most resource intensive tasks in games offloaded to special purpose processors, game designers now have the opportunity to build richer characters using more complex AI techniques than have been used in the past. While additional CPU time makes improved AI feasible, better tools for building agents are needed to make good interactive characters a reality. In this paper we present the BEHAVEngine and BehaviorShop which enable the creation of rich interactive characters.