a major trend is design those time is social believable npc, in order to npc react in a beleivable way, we need them appraise the player and build a model of him, we don''t want super intelligent agent, but agent which are capable of emotional looking response. in order to do so, we need the npc build belief about the player, according to his value and what he can see/know (but here we won''t discuss communication or any advence memory sys) this suppose of course that we have a set of preference within the script of the npc to build this the main objective is to build autonomous dramatique oriented agents the objective of the topic is to find efficient way to build an appraisal system of the player here is my proposition (two question, do we need more/less, and how to appraise them practically (base on what)? any idea????) friendliness: how much the agent like/dislike the player friendly: how much the player respond to npc''s need attraction: how much the player please/displease the player trustworthiness: how much the agent trust/distrust the player honorability: how much the agent praise/blame the player intemency: how much the npc is affect by player''s behaviour predictability: how much the player is predictable by the npc certainty: how much the npc beleive in his belief about the player trustworthiness in designing term mean what?? i have put it because it seems relevent but... certainty affect the surprise emotion, and according to personnality some relation strategy could emerge according to this value this is different from predictability because a low predictability is define as chaotic and the agent could firmly beleive that the player is chaotic then would not expect to much a desired response the whole look like a diplomacy engine, and i think we can steal a lot from work about diplomatic ai, but here it''s apply to emotion cost rather than mere capitalism the funny things is about that in a diplomacy you would try to find the more efficient way and try to cut down through dilemna and conflict within the decision, where in ''dramatic'' social simulation it''s precisly what we want contextual value: benefice: how much beneficial/threathening is the player in the context dependency: how much the player is needed/useful/obstacle to a goal >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> be good be evil but do it WELL >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Hmmm. . . well, Bioware has always run this with type of interaction by allowing the player to choose to make a roll off of their stat that effects interactions. Or games start having NPCs react differently towards other players when certain conditions have been met. In the game Arcanum, it was particularly fun to play a dullard. The NPCs always spoke to you as if they were talking to a small child.

If you are wanting to add more than a small set of conditions to this for sort of a social simulation then you will probably need to give the player a ton of ways to effect this and have an open-ended enough game that their interactions are meaningful.

I''m not sure if you would put that much effort into this game for random NPCs unless you built a whole engine around it. . . but that would make all NPCs react in the same manner when certain conditions were met. . . so games that are set up like Arcanum or KOTOR would out class the actual fun without having the same amount of work.

This idea might be really good for a social sim, dating sim, or poker sim though. Then you could tweak each of the NPCs personalities and have all the social equations running in the background.

I guess I''m saying that customized NPCs for story-driven games are fun and do a great job, but games that revolve around social interactions might benefit from your ideas.

I''d post about those ideas directly, but I''m not sure really how all the peices you mention fit together.