Traits

Traits

Traits are informational tags attached to agents and relationships to modify stats and influence relationships. Traits are central to TDRS because they are a simple and convenient way to represent emotional states, relationship statuses, personality traits, faction affiliations, and more.

We chose traits to be the centerpiece for TDRS because they are simple to define and make it easy for designers to express the personality and nature of agents/relationships.

Some relationship/emotion AI tools use models like OCEAN, which require users to design agent personalities based on their openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. However, these numbers do not allow you to express personal beliefs or biases or make it entirely clear how an agent might respond in a given social situation. They are too abstract.

TDRS's trait system empowers designers to make specific declarations about an agent's personality or beliefs. At the same time, traits are also abstract enough that they can be used to represent not only personality traits but faction affiliations, emotional states, and relationship statuses.

Traits are the recommended way to add stat buffs to agent/relationship stats, and they are an essential part of preconditions for Social Events and Social Rules.

You can learn more about defining new traits using the following guides:

• Create Traits Using ScriptableObjects
• Create Traits Using YAML Files