I had this idea for a game where basicly your poking through the cobwebs of someone''s mind looking for information, planting information, and just plaing getting the owner of the brain to do stuff. The thing is I can''t picture what the user interface should be like. Any suggestions?

This sounds a little boring and rather strange (and a little disturbing), but as far as the interface, maybe the buttons could be neurons, or it could be a 3d interface modelling a brain. I personally wouldn''t pursue this idea farther than you already have, but whatever floats your boat...



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Realm Games Company

Boring? Well ok, maybe it doesn''t cut it. I was thinking at first sort of just a tool for testing NPC AI. You want to plant the thought in your NPC''s head that he''s hungry but he''s also inteseted in something else. What is it that takes presedence? That sort of thing. Then I was thinking why not try to expand it with a bit of plot where something like you''re a telepath hired to get certain info or have someone assasinated by someone else.

I think its an awesome and *cough* original *cough* idea. Certainly not boring...not as much as the same FPS/MMORPG/RTS crap that gets slung around all the time. I liked the orginal idea more than the whole, you're an agent trying to get info, or get this person to kill that person.

If I were to make something like this, I think I'd go a little farther out there. Heard of a game called Psychonauts? (not sure if that's spelled right, heh) I would probably stray somewhat from any realism since it is an idea that's "out there", and make it more cartoony or animated. I'm not talking about like saturday morning cartoons though, I mean it should probably have a darker, and even moreso twisted tone to it (like the aforementioned game). It could be a game where you're some kind of tiny creature, who has the ability to do thiese things, the whole mind control thing. I don't know, come up with some kind of story, and thus a goal for a the creature, like he has to get somewhere, be he can't do it on his own because of his size, or whatever....so the concept of the game is inhabiting NPCs minds, and getting them to remove obstacles, solve puzzles, and the like. Oh you would handle how the actual mind control thing is tricky though, I can't think of anything real intuitive off the top of my head...but I would think if you take the time to examine it you should be able to come up with something creative.

These are just my ideas, mind you, on what you presented here. Do whatever you want to.

[edited by - Digita1Alchemy on February 17, 2003 3:07:12 PM]

[edited by - Digita1Alchemy on February 17, 2003 3:08:38 PM]

I actually like the idea of a NPC AI tool more... I actually was thinking about such an interface myself.

Since I was planning on making NPCs that have more logically stored information (as opposed to neural networks that you can''t really look at and tell what they store), I was going to have a browser of sorts that could travel around the NPCs memory graph, see what they associate with different things, maybe modify links and such -- mostly for debugging to see if different auto-arrangement stuff worked or not.

I think a 2d layout with boxes (structs) connected by lines (pointers) makes the most sense in my system, since that''s how I have it laid out so far. Getting the graph to arrange itself so that line length is minimized and overlapping lines are minimized would be a good use (IMO) for a self-organizing-map.

If anyone''s used the SQL Server Diagram designer in the enterprise manager, I''m thinking of something that looks almost exactly like that.

Yes it''d be original, but if you wanted to make a game of it, it''d really need to be fleshed out a lot. It''s a good start certainly, but the actual game is still missing...