TriadCity employs multiple AI strategies to drive NPC behaviors. Most of these are quite simple, AI being in my opinion far more artificial than intelligent. One of our most successful strategies to date is based on Rodney Brooks' "subsumption architecture" which we've borrowed from robotics. Here's a short description of how we use it.
Subsumption rejects the approach of modeling intelligence via symbolic representation, choosing instead to mimic lifelike behaviors by building high-level abstractions from layered libraries of low-level components. Lowest-level components might be as simple as "I hit something"; the next layer up might include avoidance strategies such as "back up and try a slightly random vector", or "move left several inches and try again". A next level up might abstract from particulars to "explore the world". Behaviors become more removed from details the higher they are in a pyramid of abstraction, with "behave like a human" at the top.
In TriadCity we implement subsumption by composing higher-level behaviors from a vast library of detailed lower-level ones. Low-level examples are "open the door", "look around the room", "pick up an object". These correspond to TriadCity's library of player-typable commands. There's a building-block behavior corresponding to each TC command. An intermediate abstraction might be "move from current location to the Virtual Vegas Casino", which involves querying a directed graph, moving along the retrieved path, opening any doors encountered, and so on. The next highest level might be "play slot machines in the Virtual Vegas Casino", which would require successfully moving to the correct location in the game world and executing the Playslot command. Higher still might be "gamble in the Virtual Vegas Casino", which would make a randomized selection between playing slots or roulette or etc. World authors don't need to interact with subsumed low-level components. They just assign high-level behaviors and the architecture manages details.
A common example in TC is the assignment of weighted "behavior groups" based on time of day. Let's say you assign your NPC two behavior groups, one for the dawn, day, and dusk hours, and a second for night time. Your daytlight group may include sending the NPC to work; or having it hunt slave killers in Zaroff Park; or eat lunch at a favorite restaurant; or watch the chariot races in the Circus Maximus. You'd assign each of these possibilities a weight determining its likelihood of being chosen, plus a weight determining its likelihood of being swapped out for a different one. By night you might have your NPC eat dinner somewhere; go see a movie; go shopping; go back to hunting its favorite slave killers; or go home to sleep. The result is strikingly rich. If you follow this fellow around, he performs his varied activities with human-like unpredictability. He won't simply circle the same static course over and over, and so for example if there's some NPC you'd really like to stalk, you'll have to go find him first because he could be all over the place doing things that are appropriate to his character. This is trivial for world authors to work with, allowing rich individualization of non-player characters with little effort. It puts considerable AI sophistication into play without forcing authors to interact with it.
These "subsumption" behaviors contribute verisimilitude to the game world. In TC you don't get a lot of NPCs standing around waiting to be killed. We even send our judges home from court at night. There's continual motion and variation: you can stand on a popular street corner people-watching NPCs on their way to and from jobs and hobbies and murders and freeing slaves.
Richard Bartle wrote, "It would be great to have a virtual city with 100,000 virtual inhabitants, each making real time decisions as to how to spend their virtual lives. We may have to wait some time before we get this, though." Not really. TriadCity's done it for years.
