This sort of behavior is more likely to be usefull in an MMORGP.

Dave Mark
President and Lead Designer
Intrinsic Algorithm Development
"Reducing the world to mathematical equations!"

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Original post by griffenjam
Haveing townspeople that act "real" is nice, but if you notice, very few retail RPG games even worry about this.

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That doesn''t necessarily mean that players don''t worry about this sort of thing. I know my wife particularly likes game worlds in which she can interact meaningfully with the characters... and where she''s not required to kill them all!

Timkin

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Original post by Timkin

That doesn''t necessarily mean that players don''t worry about this sort of thing. I know my wife particularly likes game worlds in which she can interact meaningfully with the characters... and where she''s not required to kill them all!

Timkin

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Interaction is a whole other can of worms.
The original poster was just talking about how NPCs go about their day. I do think that interaction with NPCs is important and would be a great feature in any RPG, but one that is lacking most of the time, and is useally very lame when it is tried (a la UO). But, even in games like UO, the movement of NPCs is still very unnatural. The smith will stay in his shop all day, merchants are there 24/7.

Jason Mickela
ICQ : 873518
Excuse my speling.

The V-Town Have-Nots

On the other hand, you really don''t want to have too much unavailable time for an NPC in an MMORPG unless it is a requirement. Imagine the frustration of the player who only plays for 30 minutes at a time and is trying to purchase an item of equipment. What if that NPC never seemed to be in his shop when the person logged on?

Dave Mark
President and Lead Designer
Intrinsic Algorithm Development
"Reducing the world to mathematical equations!"

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Original post by ImMortal Soulz
like to eat you need money-for money you need a job so you can go to the store and buy it...etc) but i dont have a clue where to begin and have little time to think about it and/or work on it so if any one knows of a gooing plan for a project in this area ited be helpfull

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The idea your talking about is actually called "Means End Analysis", atleast in academic A.I. circles anyway. There are loads of research groups looking into this sort of unscripted and dynamic style of planning, but most of what I''ve seen is really computationally intensive so not so good for games. Then again, maybe some of thier techniques could be useful applied on a smaller scale with a limited number of variables. If you wanted to look up some of these planning groups I''d recommend, FF, STAN and GraphPlan as a starting point. They should be pretty easy to find with a basic net search.

Would be nice to see some of these new techniques actually applied to games where appropriate. After all, these people have been studying it for decades now and probably have a pretty good idea how to make a dynamic plan.

Adam Wood
Lead Programmer - Paragon Gaming U.K.

Sure a point, if you play a mmorpg and only can be on from say 16:00 to 16:30 and the shopkeepers are sleeping at that time each day, you soon get angry and uninstall that game.

But hey! What''s wrong having your NPCs acting in such a way the player takes 30 minutes only to watch them acting?

If my team manages this happen when our project is finished in say 10 years, I would do tabledance!

So I agree: realistic behaving NPCs are not neccessary, but I surely would buy such a game only to watch them.

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Original post by OmniBrain
Sure a point, if you play a mmorpg and only can be on from say 16:00 to 16:30 and the shopkeepers are sleeping at that time each day, you soon get angry and uninstall that game.

But hey! What''s wrong having your NPCs acting in such a way the player takes 30 minutes only to watch them acting?

If my team manages this happen when our project is finished in say 10 years, I would do tabledance!

So I agree: realistic behaving NPCs are not neccessary, but I surely would buy such a game only to watch them.

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Even so, the AI necessary to get shopkeepers acting REALLY realistically boils down to not very much scripting, and it''s still fairly simple.

If you like, use a random number generator to determine when a shopkeeper gets up; you can use a bell-curve distribution from a math library. If you want more realism, have them go to the bathroom at random intervals. None of this is complex, or innovative; MUDs have been showcasing remarkably diverse and realistic mobs for years.

The point is that complexity on the back end may have nothing to do with complexity on the front end. Randomness may be the best AI out there; humans read order and intelligence into it.

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Don''t listen to me. I''ve had too much coffee.

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Original post by griffenjam
Interaction is a whole other can of worms.
The original poster was just talking about how NPCs go about their day.

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By interaction I didn''t just mean talking... I meant that the actions of the player have an affect on the day to day lives of the NPCs around the character... other than shooting them dead!

This is lacking in most RPG/MMORPG games out there, although you do tend to find it in games like The Sims. This is not to say I want to watch Hrun the Barbarian go on a date with Missy the Bar Maid while I''m trying to find out who holds the Key of the Ages! I''m sure most would agree though that it would be nice to have NPCs that reacted to ANY situation they came across, rather than just those few, or few dozen, scripted reactions.

Cheers,

Timkin

Ah, I see you understand my point, Timkin.
Interaction with NPCs, direct or indirect, not only go there and kill them or buy stuff from them.

Say that shopkeeper has stored food in the backroom of his shop.
Say the player is a thief, and the shopkeeper will notice every poor try of the thief to steal goods.
When the shopkeeper becomes hungry, he just turns and gets some food from the backroom.
Now the player sneaks in the backroom and removes the food.
A scripted shopkeeper simply would go into the backroom and come back a moment later.
A shopkeeper with some more AI would stand hungry or even close the shop for some moments to get some food, just enough time for the player to steal some stuff from the shop...

Sure you could script this too, but it would be some more complex, and this was only a simple example.

Interesting topic.
I don’t know if we really need such AI, because programmers usually take care the objects that are on the screen and they leave simple AI to the off screen objects.
I’m taking about the traffic at GTA3. I really want to see illusion’s Softworks approach to MAFIA: The City Of Lost Heaven about the traffic and citizens AI.
I want to see also what Elixir Studios will do at Republic: The Revolution.
It’s really difficult to control a million people.