Sorry for this but at the moment, I''m deeply involved in working out how to get custom mesh file formats into my engine. Until then I''ve suspended work on this area of the game. I know it''s a lame excuse but trying to get these custom models into my game in the form that they must be in (ID3DXMesh objects) is driving me nuts.... the second I have it sorted though my attention will be coming back to this area, feel free to throw around further thoughts until then though... I do keep checking for feedback, so thanks!!

Steve AKA Mephs

quote: Original post by Carrot
I''m interested in how you plan for the user to query the NPC.
Are you talking about an interface in the vein of Lucasarts - a list of possible questions, or are you going to allow the player to compile the question themselves (anyone remember Captain Blood?)

If the former option then is seems there are going to be a LOT of questions in the list.

Yeah, that''s what I''d wondered about.... I don''t know anything about Captain Blood tho, but what I guess would be a possible solution would be an Exile-style interface, maybe combined with a list of questions--say it''s a really sketchy/cutthroat/violent city where murders are fairly common and a certain NPC knows about several murders. The character conversing with him could ask about "murder" and then the NPC could say (likely depending on interpersonal relation levels) "I know about this one, this one, and this one" and let the player choose.

''Captain Blood'' was an old and very strange C64 game (probably out for other formats too) that allowed the player to ''converse'' with characters that they encountered in their travels by use of language icons.
Each icon (of which there were only about a dozen) represented a basic query, but used in combination allowed the player to construct quite complex ''sentences''.

Basically the idea was to forget about trying to incorporate human language comphresion into the game and instead make up a language with a syntax somewhere in between what the game could compose/understand, and what the player could compose/understand.

Its difficult to know how advanced this method actually was because no matter how the computer replied, the player would always interpret the answer (maybe a string of four icons) to mean what they wanted it to mean.

Interesting though.

I love that! That''s exactly what playing Desperados is like. Creating a set of icon-actions for each of four characters to perform becomes a way of conversing with the NPCs about how to best navigate the level. Each combination is like a question that begs certain sets of response from the NPCs. Each time I fail, I start again - that much is obvious - but sometimes I perform queries purely for the story/novelty aspect of the game''s development (and that''s when it becomes fun).