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Overview

In this This tutorial we will describe the steps will teach you how to create a new character using character using NPCEditor.
The character created in this example will be organized as follows:

• initial and final phase of exchange of greetings and thanks.
• after this, if the user states s/he wants to buy a cake, the agents will help the user buying the cake they want. This phase is structured as a series of yes/no or multiple choice questions the virtual agent asks the user. The answers the user provides will define the type of cake the agent will order for the user.

This is the dialog graph we will be creating:

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Steps

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greet the player and then prepare them a cake using a series of yes or no questions. This is the tutorial character's dialog graph:

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NPCEditor stores data in the p-list format, similar to XML. These files contain the questions and answers for the character, as well as the links between them. There is also an accounts plist required to connect a character to other modules, which is stored in %AppData%\Roaming\NPCEditor\people\

Preparation

1. Get a copy of NPCEditor. You can check out a binary out from SVN, or even simpler, grab the latest version of the Virtual Human Toolkit. The Toolkit includes NPCEditor, along with other tools to generate your own virtual human.
2. To run NPCEditor, find the run.bat in your NPCEditor install, or from the Toolkit, run the Virtual Human Toolkit Launcher and expand the '<< Advanced' options, then click 'Launch' in the NPCEditor row (that is under in the 'Agents' section.
3. Before you begin, it may be worth making some NPCEditor quality of life improvements. In NPCEditor's Preferences, turn off "Save files automatically if application is idle for 15 seconds."

Creating a New Character

1. Select the menu 'File->New' to start creating create a new virtual agentplist. Save it a as 'cake.plist'.
2. Create Inside cake.plist, select the People tab and create a new person called 'cake vendor' under the People tab.This ' person ' will handle the initial greeting exchange. Each  Each person created defines what NPCEditor calls a domain. Each domain is associated with a different classifier. A domain can work like a state in a dialog manager, we will see later how to define which utterances are defined in a particular domain and how changing domain (i.e. state) works. Make  Make sure u set both 'first name' and 'last name'. If your domain/person is just one word, you can set the last name or the first name to be a space or you can split the word into 2 parts, one for the first name and the other for the last name.
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4. Now define the connection NPCEditor uses to communicate with the rest of the Virtual Human Toolkit architecture. Select the 'Accounts' tab, then click on 'Add' and select 'Smarbody'. Test the connection by clicking on 'Connect': the button will change to 'Disconnect' and the row corresponding to the NPCEditor in the Launcher will become green. This should be defined once and associated only to one of the defined persons: the one that defines the initial domain
5. .
6. Next select as type of dialog manager 'scriptable' in the 'Conversations' tab. A new 'Dialog Manager' tab next to 'Conversations' will appear containing an initial script for a dialog manager. The script is written in Groovy and can be edited to suit your needs.
7. Set the parent property of 'cake vendor' to 'Anybody' (default value). This step defines an inheritance hierarchy among the various domains. In this case the 'cake vendor' domain inherits the utterances defined for the 'Anybody' domain.
8. Create all the other persons defined in the dialog graph above: 'cavities', 'xylitol', 'diabetes', 'cake type', 'sponge cake flavor', 'cheese cake flavor'. Set the parent property of each of them to the 'Anybody' domain.
9. Create a 'type' and 'speaker' category in the 'Setting' tab. The first is used by the default dialog manager script to handle off topic utterances from the user. The second (speaker) needs to be set for proper communication with the rest of the modules in Virtual Human Toolkit.
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11. Make sure the 'toss' category is set to be included in the answers and used by the classifier.
12. The previous steps end the setup, from now on we will add the utterances we want the agent to understand and we will define the appropriate answers. To define the reply the agent will give when it doesn't understand what the user said; add a new answer and select the type to be 'opaque'. Then define an appropriate text (e.g. "i didn't understand what you said, try to rephrase it"). For all answers you want the agent to be able to speak and animate, set the speaker to 'brad'.
13. Next add the various utterances. The first defines the agent's answer to the user's statement 'Hi'. Here leave the type of the answer unset (because it's not an answer to be associated with non understanding). Set the speaker to 'brad' as usual and the domain to 'cake vendor'. On the user pane (the left half) set the text to 'Hi'. Finally click on both newly added utterances (they both become blue) and then set the link strength to 6 to define that the one on the right should be the answer for the utterance on the left. Similarly do for adding the replies for 'thank you' and 'bye'.
14. Now we will see how to make a change of state when the user says a particular utterance. We will change from 'cake vendor' to 'cavities' when the user says that s/he wants to get a cake from the agent. To do so, in addition to the setup done for the other utterances in the previous step, just set the toss property to the 'cavities' domain.
15. Follow this procedure and complete all steps as represented in the dialog graph given at the beginning. You can see also the complete /wiki/spaces/VHTK/pages/14582324 file.
16. Before running the example, remember to train the classifier. Select all the rows in the table in teh tab 'Classifiers'. Then check the box 'Test on training data' (because the training data is too small to be split) and then click on 'Start Training'. You can change the optimization criteria. Also, in this example, the Anybody classifier will fail because it contains no links to learn between user utterances and system answers.
17. :If during the testing of the example, you see that the classifier returns multiple answers instead on just the correct one, you can adjust the threshold of that classifier by selecting the classifier in question and double-clicking the threshold displayed, as seen in this screen capture:

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