MSW,

Have I mentioned recently what an excellent thorn in my side you are?

This thread has diverged in such interesting ways... I may need to create a new one. Here''s the real, fundamental poser: It''s comparatively easy to create and simulate a character who is different physically than the player who controls him. How do you realistically simulate a character who is different socially than its player? It''s possible to limit the character so that he is less clever with words than the player: just reduce the speed at which the player can enter text for his character to say. (I''m assuming MMORPG here.) But how do you make him better than his player?

The following questions relate to the same differential problem. How do you represent craft skills in such a way that players who have skill can use their character''s abilities hands-on, but players without skill need not? How do you represent intellectual knowledge so that in-game and out-of-game knowledge are separate and one cannot be used to help the other? What about things such as lockpicking and laboratory chemistry, which people may want their characters to use but don''t have a clue about themselves? I''m really trying to avoid the "skill roll" solution, but I''m currently out of ideas. First one to have any starts a new thread...

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-SpittingTrashcan

You can''t have "civilization" without "civil".

how do you make a character act better socially then the person? why not have 2 forms of interactions between players in this MMORPG.
1) players type they''re messages, talk, chat and do that general squabble thing
2) players can chose to try and convince the other player to do something using their skills. this would be done using some sort of menu or a simple kind of script. the player that is on the being convinced end will get a message saying "this player is trying to convince u to go hug that tree", and based on their skills or intelligence or whatever, they will be presented with a choice of how they will want to respond. either "yes i''ll do that" or "disagree with the idea". the 2nd option could also be broken into a few different choices of approaches depending on the context, and then the characters in the game will duke it out in conversation (automated) and the computer spits out a result of whether he/she was convinced to do that action or not.

now i know what you''re going to say.. people won''t like the fact that they are doing something they don''t want to. "its not realistic at all". BAH! it totally happens all the time in reality. people are allways convinced to do things they don''t want to. a few months ago i can remember a time when a buddy of mine an I were walking down the street at night. he was drunk. i wasn''t. I said to him "hey i got an idea, you should go run up to that car and lay a big ol boot into the side of it as hard as you can!" just cause thats what i''m like, i spit out dumb ideas that are totally random all the time. well it turns out that he thought it was a good idea to. so he did it. he''s still not happy with me about that night though not untill after he did it did he realize it was dumb. but hey, thats life for yea right?

"The human mind is limited only by the bounds which we impose upon ourselves." -iNfuSeD

firstly, weapon randomness obviously should not devalue the skill in using it, but some parts of the body do react less consistently to damage than others

anyway about your smart avatar...

for a while ive been daydreaming about an intricate story and character knowledge system, it would be maga-hard to actually do but here goes anyway...

firstly you need many, MANY story elements happening in paralell
most of these will be ignored, forgotten or not experienced by the player (taking advantage of _human weakness_, here)
the key thing is your avatar has a knowledge system of EVERYTHING you''ve done in the game. ie the avatar has a better memory than you. more importantly, it considers each action entirely in the context of the game.

so what do we do with this?
in many games, typically rpgs or old point-and-clickers (sigh) you have conversations where you click on a selection of up to a few choices. you carry on exploring the conversation tree until you hit on the one that advances the game

for this system, we would need 2 major changes: you cannot go back up the tree (try a different one: the tree is not fully exporable) ; and there are many more things you could get your character to say, but most won''t even be available to you because you haven''t experienced the relevant part of the story.

now, in other games you get an indefinite time period to make your choice during which nothing else happens.
for this to work, there would need to be a limit (small, like 2 seconds!) before the avatar makes the choice for you.

but backing up a bit, out of the many possible conversation things you could say, your avatar''s knowledge base choses, say, the five most appropiate based on what you have experienced, with balances for personality traits (agresive, inquisitive) and selects the one most consistent with your conversation choices and actions to date.

so the effect is, if you are quick, you can get your character to say what you want from a series of consistent choices, otherwise the "best" or "most in character" one is run by default.



there are miserable limits to this, though:

the knowledge base would be huge and would need to be kept mostly on disk, accessing only relevant parts. this means creating an ai with an overlapping symbolic memory.

who wants to write, code and voice record forty conversation nodes when only eight may be experienced?

we need to express each node both in knowledge and emotional terms in a way that the avatar''s attitude can be updated accordingly, and they can easily be best-fitted in a fuzzy representation



if anyone can add to this, i''d much appreciat it (not that i''m trying to hijack your thread, of course!)

********


A Problem Worthy of Attack
Proves It''s Worth by Fighting Back

By levels I was just trying to illustrate, sorry.
Lawyers...well if you start designing a court system with lawyers and suing, etc, etc, etc.

Another thing.
No overarching story.
Little/medium sized quests, yeah, bur no story.

That way it works better.

Everything should be fairly interdependant.
That is, when the Big High Honcho Baddo with Hordes of Minions gets slain by the Valorous Heros, there should be a breakup into many Small But Bigger Than The Rest Minions over Other Minions for people to mop up.

Then if A Mage With Awesome Powers single-handedly starts assaulting a land, the AI should start moving soldiers.
And if you have enlisted in the Army Of The Land, you should be ordered to move toward the front, and you get the MPs coming after you if you run.

So is this gonna be a strain on the computers resources ?
bloody right it will be ! It better be

~V''lion


Bugle4d

Your silly little absorb, endurance, and grit systems are childs play when compared to the system I have created. This may be way above your heads, so if you start to feel faint at anytime please stop reading.

Weapons will have a damage stat on it, say for example the damage stat is equal to 7. You have 100 health, after you get hit you have 93. Take a minute to soak it in, sit down relax you''ll soon understand.

quote: Original post by ph33r
Your silly little absorb, endurance, and grit systems are childs play when compared to the system I have created. This may be way above your heads, so if you start to feel faint at anytime please stop reading.

Weapons will have a damage stat on it, say for example the damage stat is equal to 7. You have 100 health, after you get hit you have 93. Take a minute to soak it in, sit down relax you'll soon understand.

guns don't allways do the same damage, knives don't allways just scratch you for 7 hit points.
your mind-blowingly simple system is good for when you need something simple to keep things moving, but a computer can do all the math in a fraction of the time that it would take for us to do 100-7=93. So why is the computer still using the unrealistic simple method? Its about time someone tried a model that is a little more realistic.

"The human mind is limited only by the bounds which we impose upon ourselves." -iNfuSeD

[edited by - iNfuSeD on October 13, 2002 4:45:15 AM]

Ph33r. Newton''s second law says that Force = Mass * Acceleration. From what your absolutetly complex and totally ununderstandable system seems to assume is that one of these two multipliers is equal to ... *GARSPS!* ... 7!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (repeating statement terminated for brevity)


-> Will Bubel
-> Machine wash cold, tumble dry.

Umm, I think ph33r was trying to make a joke (at least it made me chuckle to read his post after reading all these indepth combat systems (which I am in favor of BTW)).

Jack