I''m with TechnoGoth on this. If nobody has any kind of faction attribute, then there''s no way for your AI to know who to attack. A player could walk from the Tabernacle of the one castle to the Naos of the other and do the funky chicken, and no NPC would be able to ID them, unless the recognized their clothing. Even if you don''t have it listed on a status screen, there must be some kind of faction/reputation/inclination variable for the computer to incorporate into calculations.

Players don''t have to pick it when they create a character, and it might not even be a one-dimensional continuum, but without a way for the system to determine the alignment of a character, there''s no way for characters to conduct any kind of struggle between factions.

Iron Chef Carnage

quote:

---

If nobody has any kind of faction attribute, then there''s no way for your AI to know who to attack.

---

Sure there is, it''s the most obvious and difficult way to implement, however, not to mention it''s one of the least technical features, if you can imagine.

You know what.
"What?"
I think I''m getting religion mixed up into this way too much.
I shall rephrase another question. How do I present good and evil without religion(or any system-since, see below, what''s good or evil might depend on the metaphysics)?

Technogoth

quote:

---

Also you state that good represents love and evil represents unredeemable does that mean that the leaders of the two factions are the ones who posses the most of these qualities?

---

One of my questions exactly(from the first post even). If this is true, then it would be really easy to see the in-game truth. However, what I want is for there to be no truth except what the player decides on for herself. And before you all get confused again, yes, *I* stated that, it doesn''t mean that''s the metaphysical basis for the game.


I''m still concerned about the ultimate end of evil. There are so many ways and yet I don''t think they''d work together hardly at all. Actually, never mind, same thing applies to the good side as well.

Anyway, since we seem destined for it, let''s talk good and evil, I have to do this anyway to create the factions for each side, so here goes
Good:
Charity
Protection
Maintenance of the Spirit(opposite of Corruption)
Killing Evil things(this one is quite a continuum and is based on the metaphysics, so it''s tricky, in other words-who or what can you kill? Demons-assuming they''re always bad, evil beings who still have souls-which also leads to-do souls exist and if you have one, does it matter?)
Evil:
Corrupt
Selfishness(do whatever it takes for a goal)
Enjoy Destroy Life(preferring to shatter lives rather than make everyone live horribly for all time)
Destroy All Souls
Torment All Souls(overrunning the world with demons)
Torment All Good Souls(revelations)
...

why?

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
be good
be evil
but do it WELL
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

too stereotypical, you can do better (killing evil as ex >>bad<< give it more work)

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
be good
be evil
but do it WELL
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Your going to have to rework your defination of "good" and "evil" because at present they arn''t very good definations, as well as it won''t be hard for the player to tell one from the other. Since you want to have the player decided "truth" then your going to need a system of good and evil that is open to diffrent interprations.

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

What were the two lists on your last post? I understand that they were associated with the good and evil factions, but were they behaviors or motivations?

I guess that if you could somehow let an NPC know what your character has been up to in the past, it would be able to heuristically form an opinion of you, but it would be tricky to code and dependent upon either omniscient NPCs or an innovation system of intercommunication between them. I can''t see any other way to do it.

"Good" and "Evil" are still sketchy terms here, and the system is dependent upon being able to directly correlate the sum of someone''s actions and choices with the content of their soul. It''s not an easy thing to simulate.

If you insist on using absolute concepts like that, I advise you to bust out an ontologically prior source of authority. It''s all better when God gets in there. C.S. Lewis wrote that evil is totally dependent upon good, because it is a corruption of good, but good can exist in the absence of evil, because it is whole unto itself. You don''t need more than one deity. Just put a big faceless cosmological god up there to represent "Good" or "Alethia" or "Order" or "Justice" and have "evil" be violations of that order. That harms the whole "stronghold of evil" situation, but doesn''t kill it.

As have so many other game designers and authors in the past, let us turn to Tolkien. Sauron is the incarnation of evil, straight down to his flaming eyes and army of freaky monsters. But his objectives aren''t "torment all souls" and "enjoy destroy life". He''s trying to upset the balance and order of the world in order to gain power and dominion. That''s the stronghold of evil: Vice. Put hatred and greed on that list, and label as "evil" all those who choose the pleasant over the good, who prefer what they want to what they need.

The Arabic word "jihad" is used primarily to refer to wars fought with swords and car bombs, but it has another, more important meaning. In Islam, "jihad" is any struggle between holiness and evil. The most common jihad is the battle inside a man''s soul between his human frailty and his potential for holiness. Fighting temptation and weakness with the swords of faith and restraint is the spirit of jihad.

And so if you want to make an artificial world in which a battle takes place between good and evil, then you must enable that world to include hard decisions. Don''t just put half of the guys in black armor. Give them motivations. The evil army pays three times what the good army does. Better still, make the good army take a vow of poverty and chastity. They don''t get any of the money, or booze, or chicks that the "bad" guys get. You''ll have people all along this continuum, of course, but most will be scum.

The great shortcoming of a game world is that there''s no eternal reward or final judgement. You''ve chosen a very difficult project. Good luck with your work.

Not to put word in your mouth, from what I''m guessing your trying to accomplish, I think you are better off creating conflicting ideologies rather then ideologies that are polar oppositites.
That should allow for player interprations as on which side is right.
For example
G: The rights of the individual are secondary to the betterment of the socitey.
E: The rights of socitey are secondary to the betterment of the indivdual.

and example application of these would be, a G person could kill or steal if they belived what they where doing was right. While and E person could kill or steal for their own advantages.

You can see how both aspect of the idealogies are similar enough to allow a player to confuse the two as well as allow for players to begin on the path of G and by the end journy find themselves on the side of E.


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

don''t have game definitions currently

not trying to create any ideology, however, I am trying to create a cognitive model that could create, analyze, and follow a wide scope of ideologies - so if you''ve got thoughts on that, go ahead.

Iron Chef Carnage: don''t sentient beings tend to behave the way they''re motivated to?

Motivations such as higher pay will have to come about naturally through the economic system, however, I could put it in because part of the premise is that there are many realms, lands, planets, dimensions, planes, etc. and that typically good and evil castles are on many of them so it is plausible that not all will receive the same kind of support. Although I had planned to use such changes to the world state to encourage the player to find the underlying plot lines. This makes me think that the game would develop a script that would be the same for every player with only the affiliations switched depenidng on what side she''s on which is not what I want. I want each experience to be unique rather than a fill-in-the-blank. Although the plot-finding may have that effect anyway. blah blah blah blah...

Also, about Sauron, if you''ll notice I put in parentheses that ''torment all souls'' is the kind of thing typical in stories where the heroes are trying to prevent the world from being overrun by demons. You see, I put wanting power and dominion over the world in the same category, though technically they don''t have to be one in the same. It probably will help to put them in finer categories, thanks for pointing it out.

Note on power and dominion, if we do look at it that way, LotR and others are really a story about a war between factions, with leaders and perhaps whole factions having different affiliations. Seems to take the grandness and epicness out of it sometimes. Though not often, its a pretty good reason to fight in DBZ, LotR, and Revelations.