Abstractions were something I was thinking about too. On the one hand it makes sense to have an abstract object like a town; Some values, like town morale, you can''t really pin down on a particular object. On the other hand, abstractions are generally things that you would have to script in from the begining, which is bad. Say the player founds a town on some island, if the abstract "town" object is something that you script in from the begining, then the player''s town is never going to become a "town", even if it has all the same elements. If you go the other way and try to make the "town" object something that is dynamically created, then your faced with the question "at what point is it a town?" I think that with some work you could probably make some kind of tech tree-ish thing where "if it has this and this, then these values are created", but I''m not sure if that''s the right way to go or not. Another thing about abstractions is that they''re just that, abstractions, they don''t exist. They''re just a generalization of a group of objects "this creates a town, a town has these characteristics, a town does this kind of things", when really, a "town" doesn''t exist, it''s just a lot of small objects working together that create the illusion of a larger thing. Of course that can be said about reality too, when you come down to it, your an abstraction. Your just a lot of little cells, working together, that make the illusion of a larger whole, which are themselves made up of even smaller particles working together... *shakes head* ANYWAY, some level of abstraction is obviously needed, we can''t go around computing what all the particles in the world are doing, but I think that the less abstraction you have, the more interesting your world is going to be, and the more likely it is that your game will be able to suprise you.
About NPCs...
I''m not sure about "smart" and "dumb" NPCs. There''ll be smarter and dumber NPCs, but making an arbitrary distinction between the two... well, I already voiced my opinion on abstraction
. I can understand where your coming from though, the rogue lord Razont is probably going to be more interesting then a farmer named Bob. What''s more, there will probably be a lot of farmers like Bob and only one rogue lord like Razont. But if one of them dies, they will both have a consequence on the same scale, just of a differing magnitude (that makes perfect sense, really...).
I think you have a better handle than me on the story system Wav, it sounds good.
What I really want to think up is a sufficiently abstracted (in the good way, or maybe I just don''t know what abstract means) object system, so that it can be adapted to any system we can think of, be it a story system, a town system, stealth, whatever. For example, all objects would probably be able to do passive emmition of some sort, they''d have a list of all actions they could perform, etc.
Sorry if I got carried away anywhere.
-Firecat
