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shadowfyr · 11-10-2002, 05:58 PM

Hmm. Well chatterbox ideas are interesting, but until someone makes a publicly available one that is at least close to a system called CYC (which has a 4 year old comprehension level) it will never quite work. The problem with CYC is it needs its own server, requires an immense database and there are major problems with it 'learning' things about the game you don't want it to know or for that matter giving in a means to pretend to be more than one mob. However, it will take this level of interaction to make it real enough to avoid the 'Oh, its just a chatterbox' response.

In general I was thinking more alonge the lines of a limited set of responses like they used to have in the ultima games, which where good enough to make them more than just a flower pot that can hurt you. Combined with that would be a simple AI like in The Sims which combines a set of attributes that change over time, like how tired, hungry, angry, greedy, etc. the mob is. So a thief that is very hungry might ignore a player completely or if greed and hunger are about equal, try to steal from you 'while' getting a snack. Each attribute would have a build rate, with say a good priest having a build rate of 0 for greed, so they would never try to cheat or steal. This requires some work to balance things so that a merchant is satisfied enough with a sale to offset the greed, at least unless they haven't sold anything for weeks, etc.

The other problem is that in The Sims how and to what the mob responds to is dependant both on level of need for that thing 'and' proximity to available sources. If a mob wanders all over town on a set schedual, this 'may' work, but if yoiu want them to wander out of their areas or be more random, how do you define proximity on a mud without giving them a map of everything and hoping you don't have to go back and change it everytime someone tweaks some code in the area. The other issue is needing a way to allow the mobs to know what objects do and how to use them. This could be based on what 'skills' the mob itself has, but they still need some way to know that the fire arrows are used with the bow it just bought, etc. It is complicated, but imho probably easier to make mobs believable in this way, than trying to make them 'talk' like real people.

11-10-2002, 05:58 PM	#6
shadowfyr Senior Member Join Date: Oct 2002 Posts: 310	Hmm. Well chatterbox ideas are interesting, but until someone makes a publicly available one that is at least close to a system called CYC (which has a 4 year old comprehension level) it will never quite work. The problem with CYC is it needs its own server, requires an immense database and there are major problems with it 'learning' things about the game you don't want it to know or for that matter giving in a means to pretend to be more than one mob. However, it will take this level of interaction to make it real enough to avoid the 'Oh, its just a chatterbox' response. In general I was thinking more alonge the lines of a limited set of responses like they used to have in the ultima games, which where good enough to make them more than just a flower pot that can hurt you. Combined with that would be a simple AI like in The Sims which combines a set of attributes that change over time, like how tired, hungry, angry, greedy, etc. the mob is. So a thief that is very hungry might ignore a player completely or if greed and hunger are about equal, try to steal from you 'while' getting a snack. Each attribute would have a build rate, with say a good priest having a build rate of 0 for greed, so they would never try to cheat or steal. This requires some work to balance things so that a merchant is satisfied enough with a sale to offset the greed, at least unless they haven't sold anything for weeks, etc. The other problem is that in The Sims how and to what the mob responds to is dependant both on level of need for that thing 'and' proximity to available sources. If a mob wanders all over town on a set schedual, this 'may' work, but if yoiu want them to wander out of their areas or be more random, how do you define proximity on a mud without giving them a map of everything and hoping you don't have to go back and change it everytime someone tweaks some code in the area. The other issue is needing a way to allow the mobs to know what objects do and how to use them. This could be based on what 'skills' the mob itself has, but they still need some way to know that the fire arrows are used with the bow it just bought, etc. It is complicated, but imho probably easier to make mobs believable in this way, than trying to make them 'talk' like real people.