Virtual Roman AI Research

Introduction

My name is Dave Irvine and I'm a PhD researcher at DMU in Leicester, UK. I'm part of the Virtual Romans project here, looking into how Romans behaved in Leicester.

"The aim of this project is to investigate aspects of life in Roman Leicester (Ratae Corieltauvorum) by creating highly accurate digital models of the known buildings and many artefacts, then populating the resulting town with virtual Romans who will live out their 'lives' in this environment."

What I do

My research here at DMU is twofold. I am aiming to apply Artificial Intelligence to the Virtual Romans, creating natural and lifelike behaviour based on what we know of Roman Briton's everyday routines. This will extend from a standard computer games' simple AI, including pathfinding, planning and crowd behaviour.

I'm also involved in choosing which game engine to implement our virtual world in, as well as assisting in this implementation.

News

• 6th March 2009 - Blog uploaded.
• 4th March 2009 - Completed work on a basic Agent simulator, includes pathfinding. I plan to use this as the basis for my completed Virtual Romans prototype, before porting the AI into a 3D game engine.
• 1st June 2009 - Locked down our 3D engine as Unity3D. Seems to be a capable engine that is relatively cheap.
• 30th June 2009 - Unity3D Pro licenses are in! Time to get coding.
• 20th August 2009 - Got to see the town model today with imported assets. Brought a copy home, but there seem to be some serious FPS issues. Need to look into a solution.
• 4th September 2009 - Finally fixed the FPS issue with Unity. FBX import seems dodgy so we should probably texture inside the engine itself rather than via 3DS Max.
• 9th September 2009 - Stair physics now working in Unity.
• 10th September 2009 - Implemented a C++ plugin for Unity that lets me run a SDL app in a separate thread. This should let me run the AI simulation outside of the Unity engine, allowing me to distribute all of the important processing.