Abstract
Crowds have often been used in interactive entertainment applications to help provide context to virtual environment or enhance the experience of the interactive entertainment application for the user. This is particularly true in an interactive narrative, where many interactive narratives forgo the inclusion of crowds due to the effort required in order to create them or at best create crowds with simplistic programmed behaviours.Therefore, an approach to crowd simulation that solves the problems with including crowds in interactive narratives would allow designers of these application to consider the inclusion of crowds. The aim of this thesis is to create a novel approach to crowd simulation that solves four key problems of including crowds in interactive narrative applications. The main contribution of this thesis is a novel approach entitled Mise-En-Scene Region.
This approach allows the control of agents inside an interactive entertainment application’s virtual environment. The control includes: regions of the virtual environment specified with data on the expected population; behaviours an agent can perform in that region and types of agents that populate the region. During the run-time of an interactive narrative simulation, an agent autonomously performs a behaviour when entering these regions. As the simulation continues, an agent may become more or less likely to enter a region based on the region’s current population. This approach is implemented in two interactive narrative applications that show the potential within interactive narratives. Finally, an evaluation has been conducted that shows the benefits of the approach in terms of qualitative and quantitative aspects.
| Date of Award | May 2021 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Julie Porteous (Supervisor) & Chrisina Jayne (Supervisor) |