Realistic In-Game Social System Network

1. Introduction

In real world, human interacts with each other and all sorts of relationships, such as family, friends and lovers, are built based on interactions. These relationships may be as simple as two people fall in love with each other, or as complex as tangled relationships. However in role playing game world, unrealistic relationship is one of the key problems. The relationships between non-playable character (NPC) are plainly scripted and static, which will make the game boring. NPC will repeat his pre-defined scripts to all players interacting with him, no matter how many times a player interacted with him. Filling emotions to NPC makes player more immersed to game and spends more time in game; complex and ever-changing relationships are what players seeking for.

In this work, we propose to create an in-game social system made of network of relationship, in order to make the relationships among NPCs and players more natural and emotions in-between deeper. The network of relationship is based on faction / country ( hostile / friendly ), number of interactivity and characteristics of character ( degree of hospitality ). The network of relationship will be dynamically updated from time to time, so that the NPC will become more natural. The key observation that enables this direct construction is that the network can be considered as the mesh, which can be computed directly using a our approach mentioned below. Using the new method, more suitable reactions can be made by NPCs to players.

2. Our Approach

Given an initial set of NPC lists containing the characteristics of each NPC, we first construct a relationship network enclosing all NPCs in game. Each NPC is added in form of a node, which contains 3 to 5 predefined emotion attributes. According to degree of relationship and the compatibility of emotional attributes among NPCs, we calculate the distance