Abstract
Several recent successful computer games feature a large 3D open world where the player has a high degree of freedom and may roam freely through the environment. While graphical fidelity of contemporary open worlds is stunning, the behavior of non-player characters (NPCs) is kept rather simple.
This is an opportunity for the academia to develop novel techniques and tools that would allow for easier creation of complex behaviors that are interactively believable - i. e. that remain believable despite unpredictable world changes stemming from player's actions. However, state-of-the-art techniques - both in academia and industry - are usually deployed only in 3D game environments with low complexity - i.e., the number of NPC actions is kept small.
We think that if this complexity is raised, the state-of-the-art techniques will be challenged and will have to be improved if not transformed totally. However, no research-friendly complex 3D virtual world is publicly available.
In this paper, we present EmohawkVille: an open-source first-person 3D virtual world that allows for simulation of a day-to-day life of NPCs and compare it with various environments already available. We also present a qualitative case study that confirms suitability of EmohawkVille for experiments concerning NPC behaviors.