Ok, so you are a player in a world. The world functions much like the real world, (people build things, romance, make children, etc). You can aspire for power, desire to belong to a group, try to kill everyone, etc. You can also travel in time, own shops, and invent things. THere are "enemies" and "friends", rival territories, much like our life. There is no "main quest" and no predetermined storyline. Events happen based on the enviroment of the game. And, anything can happen within the game. That is, you can be playing a card game, and then suddenly a swordswoman from a rival town comes in and chops everyone's head off. All areas of the game are accessible. But, if you go around blowing up walls, guards will come out to get you. There would not be any speech in the game, because text would be dynamic based on the dynamic quest(unless there could be a perfect way to match up the sound of words to make convincing sentences) What do you think (constructive criticism welcome)

I think there are some good ideas on a general level, but start trying to implement that and you'll realize it's an impossibly large task. You need to think a lot more about how any of your ideas are actually going to work before you'll be able to do anything with them.

tj963

We used to toss this idea around here years ago, so I'm not surprised people still do. The mechanics of creating such a world are pretty much unfathomable. Some games have broken the mold by presenting what seems to be autonomy in the virtual world, but achieving true autonomy is impractical (I won't say impossible) given a development time frame and the hardware you're working with. I could see this type of project becoming an open-source endeavor, but it would take years to get anywhere, let alone reach maturity.

It's always been a good idea. If you want to take off with it, be my guest. Do some research. Figure out how existing games work (perusing the scripts in Gothic II will give you some good ideas), and build on that. You'll either have a sudden insight that will set your project in motion, or you'll give up very quickly like the rest of us have done.

Nice points. I can imagiane that a game of this functionallity would be a huge undertaking. I would like to make a game similar to this in theory first (That is, with little or no graphical representations first). Cutting the question of graphics, that leaves the issue functionality, and processing/memory resources.

Here is an example

100 characters (50 male, 50 female) in the present 21st century. (ANother idea is that at the game's start, you can choose what technologies are present)

John wants to deliver a sugar cluster to Wanda. Wanda will respond back with 24 gold. John will choose whether to drive there, send it via a mail system, walk there, etc. Or you can be passing by and he can offer to pay you for the job. If you decide to do so, Wanda takes it and begins to flirt with you. You can respond by having sex, or just leave.


THe text in the game would be soley based on the game. THerefore you can freely chat by asking Wanda, "How do you know John?". THe game translates each word

"How": what functions make the rest of the sentence possible
"do": what functions make the following happen
"You": what functions make the following happen to Wanda
"Know": what functions make Wanda know the following
"John": what functions make Wanda know John

Accoriding to this structure, the game would research what functions make wanda know john. A reply would be something similar to: "I was designed to record information on NPCs if they get near a certain radius. Therefore, John was once in the radius and that is how I know john." which would could be translated to, "I met him."

Any nouns, verbs, or any words would be confined to the game. Thereby eliminating incomprehensible statements (You couldn't type "Hey did you watch the San Fransisco Raiders game?" becuase san fransisco wouldnt be an ingame place, and so the text wouldnt go through to the game.

I've toyed with an idea to fake something like this. Basically the world is populated by what I'll now call an Entity. Each entity would 'control' about 20-100 NPCs, that is a procedure that controls where the NPCs move to, what they do, and how they interact with NPCs of other entities and the player characters.

The world is then broken down into regions/cities, and towns. If a player isn't in an area, then the computer doesn't really care what happens there. It would then calculate production rates, and consumption rates to give a supply/demand relations for all items, which is then used if the player is in a nearby region to make dynamic market prices. Include random factors, generate things like raids that destory houses/food that might drive prices up, or shift NPCs away from the area.

Trade routes would be generated based on Supply and demands and ease of travel, and these routes would then also be used to cull the generation of events. The regions right next to the one the player is in will still have events generated (NPC from entity A kills/steals from B, news reaches Player and raises tension levels between allies of A and B in all regions) and then following back trade routes to other regions to generate random events there to be used and news and rumours.

This basic idea would cut down on the hardware requirments to do something like this. It however would require lots of work to keep things stable, so all the entities don't kill themselves off in the first hour of gameplay.

*edit* by the way, I've been picking away at a system using this for what is currently almost a MUD style game, starting with two kingdoms, each about the size of the UK, and populated by about '20,000,000' NPCs, but closer to 2000 as far as the computer cares. This allows the player to either stick close to home, doing whatever, or being an adventurer, traveling around the world, not really getting to know anyone.
Oh, and another part of the system I almost forgot to mention was that some NPCs become linked to the PC, if the PC interacts with an NPC they make a simple link, storing a bit of data about them, which will be culled off after awhile if they don't interact any more. However if you group with an NPC or spend a lot of time in the same shops, the NPCs there are fleshed out more. You can't store a history for 20,000,000 NPCs, it just isn't going to work well, but you CAN store the life history of 20 of those. Also some special Entities, like royalties, would have more stored about them, as well as famous heroes, theives, villians, etc in the world, but by far the bulk of the NPCs are simply that, bulk, all those people you walk by in a real city that you don't know their name, but they are there and ARE the city.

You want a real-life simulator. Only pure evil geniuses can pull those off, and even when they do, the games completely suck.

Don't create a huge list of things you want, then figure out how to do them. Add one thing to your list, work out every little detail about how it would be done, make sure the work envolved is acceptable, then add another. If you can design your game from top-down, you can even add these details after the game is running and ready to go. If so, you can impliment the ideas as you go, and never get stuck up over your head. If something won't work, you'll know right away, and can change it or throw it out.

The main idea is, your game works without building things, romancing, making children, traveling in time, or owning shops. So you can add each one of these details on top of what is complete. Like a pencil drawing that is never finished. You need to start with the main outline, and not worry adding the freckles until you get that foundation.

I guess my question is really, what aspects about the game would make the game fun to play? After looking at eye-candy filled trailers and rehashes, these two combinations (with occasional bouncing boobs) has been a good formula for making a fun game. I want to know if a game could be developed so that the random quests that are generated would generate just as much fun and or pleasure. Just how can that be implemented.

Any thoughts on this?

Quote:

Original post by headfonezI would like to make a game similar to this in theory first (That is, with little or no graphical representations first). Cutting the question of graphics, that leaves the issue functionality, and processing/memory resources.

Psh... the graphics would be the easy part.

I want you to go online (well, more like stay online) and find a chat bot of some sort. Try talking to it. See how incredibly stupid it sounds 95% of the time. Now imagine playing a game in which the only way to talk to NPCs was with something like that. Developing just a conversation thing like what you have described would be insanely difficult - there's a reason no one has done it yet.

This is not to say that it's impossible. I mean, just 5 years ago and people would have thought Will Wright was crazy for trying to create Spore; and some still do.

But, regardless of whether or not it's possible, I don't think that you could actually classify this as a game. Games have to have goals, so if there is no main storyline or anything like that, it can't really have a goal, and therefore not a game.

Edit: posted while I was writing. I do not believe that randomly created content will ever be able to be *as* good as a finely crafted human-made game. That said, I don't even know how to create a 'good' random content generator.

The goal would be determined by the player. There are goals created in the game. SO the game would be a collection of minigames.

THe conversation in the game would not be too dificult as long as it is confined to the laws of the game.

Player: "Hello NPC#7. Did you find your shield yet"

Did: past
You: Did a past event occur to NPC #7
Find: Did NPC #7 find the following
Your: Did NPC #7 find the following, which belongs to NPC #7
Sheild: Did NPC #7 find the Shield, which belongs to NPC #7
Yet: Did NPC #7 find the Shield, which belongs to NPC #7 untill this current time.




Reply,
NPC#7: "Not yet."

Interactivity is all about what verbs the player wants, and you have to make sure you give him all of the verbs to interact with your world. The trick isn't to let the player do anything they want to, the trick is to make them not ever want to do anything that they can't do. This is done by not only limiting the rule set, but designing the world so that the player never says "gee, I wish I could go through that door" or "why can't I jump on top of that tiny crate?"

Many games do this by choosing such a compacted world/feature set that the player will never question "why can't I go to a bar and pick up chicks?" (Pac-Man, Tetris)

Many games do this by limiting the interactions to a particular set, such as only physical agility (Mario), only mental puzzles (Myst), etc.

When it comes to language, natural language processing is pretty close to impossible with current technology. That means a "language" would have to be invented: see Trust and Betrayal : The Legacy of Siboot (the designer discusses his methods in the book Chris Crawford on Game Design).