are there any games out there werein the player has the ability to communicate with the AI on more than a superficial pre-determined level? i''m referring mainly to question and answer dialogs wherein the questions have not been pre-chosen by the game designers. i ask because my idea, which centers around realism and open-ended gameplay, would almost require the ability to ask questions of the ai inhabitants of the game world (such as, "you wanna help me kill this guy?"). regardless of what''s been done before i will try my hardest to implement a language system to make this possible, but i would like to hear of any examples of this being done in other games, if there are any.

You could go back to the old days. Ever play the early King''s Quest, Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, etc. style games? It had some keywords that it would recognize and would ignore the rest. So, let''s say in your particular situation it would recognize "take" and "bowl" (because there''s a bowl you might want to take). Now, you could say

"take bowl"

and it would take the bowl. You could also say

"take the bowl"

or even

"take the bowl that is on the table"

and it would strip it down to "take bowl" and it would take the bowl.

This would be a simple way of getting something that looks like you''re able to form actual sentences. It does have flaws, however. Like the whole "guess the magic word" thing.

hmmm...that''s a decent way to do it. sometimes you need a big brush and sometimes you need a small one. obviously the instructions for the game would have to specify that you couldn''t just say to an AI character something like "gee steve i dunno, you really think those nails are gonna hold?" most conversations would have to center on questions and answers, and the answers would be determined by the AI character''s intelligence attributes.

heh...maybe it could say "smoke bowl" and then the screen will turn all hazy.

There was a game released for various home computers (Amiga, ST, etc) in the 80''s called "Captain Blood". It was an inter-planetary adventure thing, and it had this unusual translating communication interface for chatting with the various beings you met on the planet surfaces. You had a vocabulary of a few dozen icons (which also had english descriptions), but you could string these together to form a whole range of different questions or statements. The AI character would then reply through the same interface. It worked surprisingly well - it felt like you were interrogating a character, rather than trying to find a sequence to prompt a predetermined output.

I can see two immediate benefits to this system, over just typing in english sentances :

- You don''t get any of those embarrassing "why do all these extra-terrestrial being speak english?" type questions
- You can simplify the processing greatly by having a vocab of 40-50 words, rather than having 300k to recognise, or however many you''d need for English.

It''s worth having a look at that game if you can.

quote: Original post by Pootle
- You don''t get any of those embarrassing "why do all these extra-terrestrial being speak english?" type questions

well, my game is set on earth, but 300,000 years in the future after the end of our civilizations. meterorite impacts, shattered moon, new exotic elements with magical powers, etc., etc. as such there will be different langauges and the player''s character will only be able to read in english the common language for his/her starting location. because english is the most widely spoken langauge in the developed countries of europe and north america it becomes the root of about 80% of the langauages that will be spoken (in a manner consistent with latin in today''s world).

i''m thinking that the icon thing is a little too limited for this game. because it spans the entire planet, inhabitants of each area will have local vocabularies in addition to the common vocabularies shared by all, thus adding to the total vocab pool.

This is an awful lot of work and at the end of the day I don''t think the market will thank you for it. Text/typing based games died out because they were too hard to do well and users don''t want to bother. There are three main points here.

1. Language interpreter.
First you have to make a good interpreter with a large vocab which is a big job in itself. And even if you create a great one I doubt people will enjoy it because most people are lousy typists. Just take a look at most threads and you will see loads of typos. All it takes is one typo and the communication will fail.

2. Then you have to create an AI system that understands human speech and how it relates to the current game situation. No one has been able to come up with a decent AI and if it isn''t decent then your whole system will just look silly.

3. Total freedom destroys the design. If the user can say what they want then they can discuss things their game character does not know about yet and that breaks the suspension of disbelief because it allows you to step out of character.

I think the Capt Blood idea is better. Selecting idea to communicate makes a much easier interface. Another possibility is the old Virtual Theatre interface used by Revolution in Lure of the Temptress.

Dan Marchant
Obscure Productions
Game Development & Design consultant

at the end of the day i don''t really care if the market thanks me for it. i am doing this, first and foremost, because of my disappointment with what the market has provided so far. i realize that this will be, by far, the most difficult aspect of the game to implement, but if it can be done correctly i see no reason why it would not greatly benefit the gameplay.

however, when you say that this allows the player to discuss things that their character isn''t aware of yet, what exactly do you mean by this? i mean, i understand that the player can go beyond the boundaries of their character, but my thoughts were that the player himself wouldn''t be aware of many aspects of the game until he experiences them firsthand, or is told of them by other characters. because of the scope of this game, it is doubtful that even after hundreds of hours of gameplay the player would be aware of all that there is to be aware of. and even if they are, this would be no different from any other game upon completion.

first and foremost, the communication system is a means of asking and answering questions, and cementing relationships between characters. for instance, if the player is involved in a mission to find a specific item, but he doesn''t know exactly where it is, he could ask local townspeople. thus a question like "where is the lost sword of nihility?" can be pared down to "where", "sword", and "nihility". thus the ai can respond "it''s in the cave to the south of town" certain words would trigger certain responses, dependant on the ai intelligence attributes and local vocabulary.

I''ve thought about it and In my game I use coversation system. But the player choose topics from a list, rather then typing in have you heard anything about the train robbery. Which would be very difficult to code. You choose question and topic from a list of available ones.
example:
Question topic
Ask about Train Robbery
Ask for More information
Where is Bandits
What is ruins
Who is Baron Strauss

So if the player selects "Ask about Train Robbery" Then the npc will give a response. It may give you a new topic or kinda of question to ask.


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Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project
Chaos Factor Design Document

i''ve seen this in neverwinter nights. it''s okay, and i could compromise, but it would feel like a cop-out. anyways, i appreciate all of the comments, both positive and negative. they help with perspective. i can''t let this thing turn into something like some big-budget hollywood movie that takes twenty years to make and goes nowhere.

Wow, these are some very lofty goals... If you are dead set on doing something like this you may want to look into Natural Language Processing. I believe Bell Labs and others have been researching these systems for years and you may be able to find some info by Googleing - I think that after you get finished reading any of these text you''ll realize that you might want to limit the system somewhat.

I''m not trying to throw a wrench in you wheel... but at some point you have to finish the game or you will perfect NLP

I will add that I think the Captain Blood thing was and is the coolest way of communication that I have seen in a game. You can probably explain away your multiple culture issue by borrowing from Star Trek and using a Universal Translator - UT''s save the day!

Dave "Dak Lozar" Loeser