Human-like virtual characters are crucial for games, storytelling, and virtual reality, yet current methods rely heavily on annotated data or handcrafted persona prompts, making it difficult to scale up and generate realistic, contextually coherent personas. We create the first QA dataset for BaZi-based persona reasoning, where real human experiences categorized into wealth, health, kinship, career, and relationships are represented as life-event questions and answers. Furthermore, we propose the first BaZi-LLM system that integrates symbolic reasoning with large language models to generate temporally dynamic and fine-grained virtual personas. Compared with mainstream LLMs such as DeepSeek-v3 and GPT-5-mini, our method achieves a 30.3%-62.6% accuracy improvement. In addition, when incorrect BaZi information is used, our model's accuracy drops by 20%-45%, showing the potential of culturally grounded symbolic-LLM integration for realistic character simulation.

Automated plot generation for games enhances the player's experience by providing rich and immersive narrative experience that adapts to the player's actions. Traditional approaches adopt a symbolic narrative planning method which limits the scale and complexity of the generated plot by requiring extensive knowledge engineering work. Recent advancements use Large Language Models (LLMs) to drive the behavior of virtual characters, allowing plots to emerge from interactions between characters and their environments. However, the emergent nature of such decentralized plot generation makes it difficult for authors to direct plot progression. We propose a novel plot creation workflow that mediates between a writer's authorial intent and the emergent behaviors from LLM-driven character simulation, through a novel authorial structure called "abstract acts". The writers define high-level plot outlines that are later transformed into concrete character action sequences via an LLM-based narrative planning process, based on the game world state. The process creates "living stories" that dynamically adapt to various game world states, resulting in narratives co-created by the author, character simulation, and player. We present StoryVerse as a proof-of-concept system to demonstrate this plot creation workflow. We showcase the versatility of our approach with examples in different stories and game environments.

When training physically simulated characters basketball skills, these competing talents must also be held in balance. While AAA game titles like EA's NBA LIVE and NBA 2K have made drastic improvements to their graphics and character animation, basketball video games still rely heavily on canned animations. The industry is always looking for new methods for creating gripping, on-court action in a more personalized, interactive way. In a recent paper by DeepMotion Chief Scientist, Libin Liu, and Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jessica Hodgins, virtual agents are trained to simulate a range of complex ball handling skills in real time. This blog gives an overview of their work and results, which will be presented at SIGGRAPH 2018.