You''re right about NLG. It offers some interesting possibilities for human/NPC interaction. For example, we don''t always offer straightforward answers to questions....

Basically, from what I can work out, NLP doesn''t really seem to be lighting the candle of game developers. There are many, many reasons for this. I worked as a programmer in a games company for a while and due to incessant deadlines we spent a lot of time trying to work out what to leave out not how to include something. NLP is hard too.

Inputting text is also a bit old hat but speech understanding is a problem of a different order. Companies may be waiting for speech understanding to get better.

I started a slightly more specific thread a while back, so to possibly save you from being flamed by someone like RPGeezus...

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=126687

Lots of useful algorithms and ideas there.

NLP is currently something people spend 10-20 years researching. So it'll get there eventually, but not in the normal game development schedule.

Not to say that you can't learn a lot from trying! Good luck.

Tom

[edited by - ParadigmShift on June 10, 2003 2:33:28 PM]

how did the black and white crew attempt to implement nlp in their game? could you describe what functionality nlp provided?

another reason nlp has not been "lighting the candle" could be that nlp still resides largely in the research domain, even though the concept has been around for years. managers are generally not ready to risk their budgets on unproven technologies.

ParadigmShift

Thanks for the tip. I''ve read that thread now. Wow!!

Are you still working on this stuff? Regardless of some of the opinions expressed, if there was a game that had come anywhere near implementing the stuff you describe we''d all have heard about it.

I appreciate that NLP is hard but IMO we''re not really going to have ''intelligent'' characters until we have some form of language, and the games companies probably aren''t going to be the ones that push this particular envelope.