quote: Original post by Sean99
syn_apse,

Sounds like you''ve got very similar goals to my own. I''m pretty far along on a text-based conversation engine myself which has the same goals in mind. While there is no menu system per se, I use what I call pre-emptive parsing to ensure that the player is only allowed to type something which makes sense to the game, and I have included a mechanism for the player to see what words/phrases are currently acceptable, so there is no guessing on the player''s part on what the game is expecting as input.

I have intimately linked knowledge, conversation, and behavior. An NPC''s behavior and conversation are driven by dynamic evaluation of his knowledge base (and personality). I''m not using quest triggers of any sort, nor am I using any scripted conversation. Obviously, it''s going to be a challenge to refine and expand the system so as to make events and conversation compelling, but I believe the base is sound enough that with enough effort and creativity, my system has as good a chance as any of achieving the elusive combination of open-endedness and decent narrative.

If you''re interested, I can provide more details or send you a demo of the conversation engine.

Sean

this is encouraging.

my ideal goal would be entirely non-scripted conversation. as of now, however, my thoughts were that the player can say anything that he wants, and that the AI would pull a scripted response from a pool of thousands of possiblilities. the specific response triggered would be determined by user input, situation, AI intelligence and personality attributes, and then would be chosen at random from a list of a dozen or so comments, all which essentially mean the same thing.

this is something that i could live with, but if non-scripted AI speech is within reach, i would definently give it shot. i''d love to have more information about your conversation system. any help would be appreciated (and credited, if this ever comes to pass). a demo of the engine would be choice. my e.mail address is... jacobsk@bgnet.bgsu.edu

quote: Original post by syn_apse
look... i''m not trying to make an android here. it will be hundreds of years before you can talk to a computer like you would a person. what i am saying is that putting the conversation in a list gets in the way of what i want to do because there are only so many things that you can fit into a dialog box. i don''t want players to have to scroll through a thousand different questions and answers in order to get their point across.

However, the players will never know what options are available to them if they don''t have a list. And people will just hack your game and put lists of keywords in a FAQ, so no big deal.

quote:
first of all, if the character already has the information, then asking about it is redundant. secondly, not all AIs are created equal. my plan is to have AIs generated randomly (except for certain characters deemed essential), and their abilities to answer questions and hold conversations are dependant on a host of intelligence attributes and local vocabularies. thus, if you ask a question that the AI doesn''t understand, then that AI will tell you that he doesn''t know and that you should ask someone who does.

For that look at Fallout(the first one). I can''t believe how so many people missed this. Besides them menus, they had a function where you could type some keywords and the NPC would try to answer. They dropped it in Fallout 2.
I kind of liked it, but there were some silly things. I can''t remember exactly, but it had to do with information that particular NPC should never posess, but it knew about it nonetheless. They tried to put some knowledge constraints, but it was a massive work, and many things slipped. Also, some very basic information was missing.

Interaction with NPCs in UO was also based in text, for everything like buying, selling etc. You could also get some information this way, but it was so limited that you couldn''t really call it useful. Besides, with so few keywords it would take lots of guessing.