About the TIER Engine Project
(Note: This was an academic project. It is no longer in development)

 

Overview

This goal of this project was to develop a self-interacting world where each character had its own goals and schedules that could depend on other characters to complete. These goals could be preempted by outside influences such as danger, distractions or story elements.

 

Description

TIER was an academic project being developed as a study of self-interacting story worlds. Characters in the world each had their own tasks and schedules (jobs and duties) as well as social networks (other characters they trust with information and gossip - although this feature was never completed). On top of this base system of interaction was to be a the story weaving and drama system. The story and drama system was inspired by Chris Crawford's book “Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling”.

Libraries

This project takes advantage of several open source libraries: OpenGL, GLUT, Tiny XML, Open Steer and Boost.

Early testing of the path finding and avoidance system (Open Steer).

World Creation and Layout

The system supports the COLLADA file structure. As such, characters and models can be created in many of the commercial 3D content creation packages available. Maya 6 and 7 were used during the development of this project. Maya will also be used as the level layout tool. Custom MEL scripts were to be developed to specify the relationship between objects in the interactive world.

 
The characters are able to find the shortest path to a destination using an implementation of Dijkstra's algorithm (from the Boost library).

 
An example of socializing and gossip simulation.

Future Development

This project is no longer in development (but the passion is still alive).

The project was also created to experiment with cinema style camera movements. The camera style would lean more towards cuts, tracking and dollies, than the frantic panning that most 3D games employ.

References

Motion Control: A “Notion” for Interactive Behavioral Animation Control
Jane Wilhlms and Robert Skinner
University of California at Santa Cruz

An Oz-Centric Review of Interactive Drama and Believable Agents
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/oz/web/papers/CMU-CS-97-156.html#introduction.

An Agent Based Framework for Visual-Interactive Ecosystem Simulations
André M.C. Campos, David R.C. Hill
Blaise Pascal University
ISIMA (Computer Science & Modeling Institute)

Crowd simulation for interactive virtual environments and VR training systems
Branislav Ulicny and Daniel Thalmann
Computer Graphics Lab (LIG)
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology