Drama Princess’s main focus is on a sort of decorative behaviour that only serves the purpose of making characters appear believable in a game. Often, however, characters will have a function other than decoration. With the current model, it would be difficult for a character to have personal goals, like trying to go to a certain location, being a tourist looking at things, following another character. Even for reasons of credibility it would be good if the actors could display such behaviour. And it’s another way for the author to define a character’s role or personality (a person is often characterized by his profession).
In Characters with jobs, I proposed the idea of a hard switch between the character’s “ambient AI” behaviour and a form of very controlled goal-oriented, more or less scripted behaviour when you want the character to perform a certain task. This may remain a suitable solution for forcing the character to behave in a certain way exactly (in a cut scene e.g.). But it is too strict and demands too much control from above to be suitable for general use.
Rather than continuously telling an actor what to do, we will include a task list in the definition of his personality. Not every character needs to have a task list, of course. Unlike other behaviours in the game, these tasks are not connected to objects. They are connected to the actor. They are its goals in life, so to speak.
As such, in Romanticism terms, they can be defined a opportunities without an intimacy requirement and coming from an imaginary object with which the actor has a a good relationship. Since they don’t have an intimacy level, the actor can perform tasks whenever it “wants”. And since the relationship is good, it will prefer to perform this task over most. The exact level of this relationship can be used to define the importance of the task.
This way, the opportunities list is still active and the task can be interrupted when the actor meets an object it really really likes. This should lead to more believable behaviour.
Since tasks are not connected to anything in the game world, they need to be “injected” into the opportunities list artificially. Since they are very important but they should be interruptable by very loved objects, we can add them to the opportunities list in between the filters of Intimacy and Fondness.
When the task’s goal has been reached, the actor is allowed to behave ambiently. Until the conditions change. Then the task needs to be prioritized again. The simplest way to do this is by adding a condition for injecting the task in the opportunities list. Something like “if the target is further than 20 meters away, follow it”. We could add some randomness and relativity to the condition to allow for less predictable behavior. Something like “the further away the target is, the higher the chance that you should start following it”.
Once a task has been chosing, the actor should be fairly obstinate about reaching its goal. This can be achieved by not allowing the fascination for the opportunity and the attitude towards the (imaginary) object to drop. For this, we can add an exception rule to the system that reduces fascination and attitude when interacting with objects.
Unlike normal opportunities which are selected from the surroundings and come with the necessary parameters, tasks need to have logic that allows them to actively fill in these parameters. If the task of “look at a landmark” is chosen for our Tourist character, the actor needs to actively search for the nearest landmark and move towards it.
Tasks are described in exactly the same way as opportunities (see From goal to behaviour). Tasks are independent components that can be shared by multiple actors. Tasks could even be used by objects to broadcast as opportunities. A landmark could broadcast a “look at me” opportunity e.g.