Biggles<font color=#AAFFAA>The Man Without a Face</font>
We are? I thought we were only doing the story one.
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[b][url="http://www.minbari.co.uk/log12.2263/"]Required reading[/url][/b]
Never eat anything bigger than your own head.
The Balance provides. The Balance protects.
"Nonono...Is not [i]Great[/i] Machine. Is...[i]Not[/i]-so-Great Machine. It make good snow cone though." - Zathras
I dunno fellas, I thought we'd pretty much nailed down the concept work for a storyAI or if you will a NPGM ( non-player game master ; Dungeon master is what they were originally called just for reference. )
The actual engineering of the AI, is I think best left to Biggles, John and those fellows with the big logical hemispheres... which certainly aint me.. [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img]
I think the concept is sound... the way it works in theory is good to go... now its a case of hard wiring the damn thing to make it go... thats why I shifted the topic slightly...I cant see much merit in laying bricks now... we have the basic 'ready-for-blueprint' drawings...the actual implementation of the AI is for paid time later.. [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img]
I've had alot of time to think.. I've been doing some subcontract signwriting with a three inch brush and 900 square yards of warehouse wall.. suffice to say my brain is not required to be on task for 90% of the time.. so it wanders off and builds game universes... and bits of unpainted wall make for great note taking.. [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img] So...
now to expand on what I said in the previous post...
So anyways... the 'brains-trust' builds a sooperdooper AI to make a nice game... now if it has as much grunt as we've been crediting it with... it will be excellent for a nice freeform kind of experience... a world with just enough structure to keep things going... and loose enough to allow the punter to feel as if he had a place in the timeline/story... lets take that as a given...
A game such as this would be a perfect prologue... the game AI is intelligent enough to feed the beginnings of a story to the punter...basically it is boot camp and introduction in one... the punter becomes immersed in a new universe.. gets past the 'training wheels' bit, knows how to fight/play/live in this universe... and he/she gets a taste of a bigger world that awaits on-line... a couple of droids land in thier lap with a holgraphic message for some "Obi-wan dude"..;D
Now I am not in the slightest bit putting down a silicon based storyteller... but I think it is ultimately just another good tool... the little winding key on a much bigger can of sardines...
A proper... five year story arc and an evolving and fluid universe... and in the back somewhere there is a tempreture controlled room with row upon row of nutrient tanks all filled with clones of Randy...guiding and shaping the story as the punters experience it...
It would be F ucking tough work... I've done enough GMing with paper and dice based games... and trust me... sometimes all your carefully wrtten notes are for squat when your deviant characters do someting completely and utterly unexpected...
For instance... they are supposed to go meet a contact at a nightclub... instead they launch a Light-Anti-Tank-Weapon through the window because the antagonist is talking to thier contact...
and you were going to relate about 70% of your story hook through that contact...
You have to fly by the seat of your pants... and man... its just like any other adrenaline sport... it scares the shit out of you and its the best fun you can have... [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img]
Atleast with an online game their are some paramaeters to fetter in the punter... some of the walls are solid and all the doors have something behind them... unlike a Paper and Dice RPG where there can be nothing but dark vacuum until one of the players wants to open it... ( thats all metaphor folks but I'm sure you follow )
There are a million little GM's maxims, himts and tips that apply but thats getting away from the basic concept...
I think it best both commercially and in terms of progress to do a good deal with AI... but do the best that can be done to really bring the game alive... and that means meat online... the ole Sapien mark one is the best computer out there...
The biggest snag with talking about this kind of online Storyverse is it is very hard to talk in metaphorical hypotheticals... so I'm going to dump the gist of the universe on the bottom of this post... and tie back to it with what I'm on about above.
Please.. no comments on aesthetic or literary content, lets talk shop, the mechanics of a Storyverse.
Bucaneers - (working title)
background in a nutshell
- think Babylon Five done by MGM when Errol Flynn was the leading man of choice... swashbuckling, honour bound, dashing heroes and heroines...with more Buck Rodgers 'built to last' 1950's valve and bus-bar driven technology, highly sophisticated but bulletproof.
- small tramp freighters and merchant spaceships traverse vast stretches of space between colonies...
- they are preyed upon by pirates...( the punters )
- in return, the pirates are honour bound to open up new routes and do the hard yakka prospecting and exploring, hence creating more traffic, and giving them more targets to plunder and suppport thier livelihoods...
Now... the single player game could be( just as an idea for this universe ), the punter starting off as a 'young man running of to sea/space' to seek his fortune... joins a crew on a merchanter...does his fare share of swabbing decks and all the other hazing rituals ( basic training in the games flight engine, ( say Starfury-like for convienence ), then managing basic resources like life support/fuel etc, ( valuable lessons needed to maintain a vessel in the storyverse online..
and so it goes... learning all the ropes...
Then a pirate vessel strikes... he learns how to fight... the pirates took on too big a target, namely the punters freighter crew/captain and got thier arses kicked. During the action the punter repels a boarding action.. ( a first taste of a FPS type game with a GENUINE POINT... ie not simply a fragfest or 'capture the flag'... if your vessel is taken over... or the pirates manage to force the ship to eject its cargo pods then you lose your job or a huge pay cut/demotion/get fired... The punter learns that there are more than one way to subjugate and control a vessel other than brute force and destroying it.
The captain takes the 'boy' aside and shows him the tactical holofield.. ( an ITF or Homeworld skirmish action engine ) and he learns more about the wiles of a life on the 'lanes. ( Foghorn Leghorn voice/SPACE lanes, that is/ Foghorn voice. )
The pirate vessel's crew is brought aboard, leaving the door open to more exposure to the Piratical way of life from the scurvy spacedogs in the brig... and also drops a few choice 'clues' in the punters lap... about the direction of the story... which he will find online eventually...
To close off the prologue, the punter finds his current Captain is not going to retire anytime soon... and if the punter wants to get any further up the food chain than First mate... then he better go find himself a gig on another vessel... or spend his savings on a pile of junk like an ancient YT1300 (the tiny tramp freighter design on which the Millenium Falcon is based) and strike out on his own... and the first place he goes is to SpaceOne.... the monty huge spaceport/warehouse/whorehouse/alehouse/outhouse on dear ole Luna... to look on the 'job boards' and 'auction sheets' for a new adventure ( this is the online server...hopefully populus with vast numbers of old Vaccs( read old salts ) ready to 'do over' a new crewmember... )
Here the beauracratic engine....the police and military are the 'Randycopies' tools to control the PC's. The media and the corporate bodies in residence offer the money/ships/contacts/equipment and all the other rigmarole needed to get the punter into space... probably with a huge debt to work off, (or shirk out of.. [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img]) but something is amiss... someone is pasting and wasting both pirate and freighter alike.... aside from the day to day to and fro of stealing and dodging and living.... something is not right in the storyverse.... the holovids are full of reports of vessels and wayports being destroyed... (I think you know the way things go from here... )
Perhaps this one particular punter is going to be one of the lucky ones.... one of the people lucky enough to experience this new threat first hand.... a big black nasty Q ship... ( WW2 merchant ship festooned with hidden weapons designed to sink and destroy unwary vessels both merchant and military.... ) being crewed by GMPC's from Bucaneer HQ... this is as much a battle as a key event in the storyverses timeline... what happens this day will ripple through the storyverse when the lucky pirate makes it to the next wayport an reports what happened on the Pirates BB... or maybe they wont say a thing.. and it will be the next punter who drops the next clue for the Storyverse to continue....
And oh yeah..... nothing wrong with true cooperative play... takes alot of crew to look after a big vessel.... and nothing shoots/flies/fights better than a meat crewmember.... gun turrets, reactors, boarding shuttles,fighters and all manner of things always work better with crew rather than HNPC's.... if you want to tackle on of those monty huge bulk carriers on the major spacelanes then you better learn how to work together.... because you need a big ship to steal big ships.. ( or atleast ALOT of little ones )
The scale of this is vast.... local Bucaneer servers are mirrored in the Storyverse as spaceports... major ones along the trade routes between colonies....huge ammounts of recruiting would need to be done to swell the ranks of the Bucaneer company... there is always going to be alot of "us-and-them"... SSL (Star and Sattelite Logistics corporation) would be the storyverse 'front' for Bucaneers, sending out targets for the pirates... selling new ships, weapons....supplies etc etc.
Pirates would have to carefully weigh up targets.... work out the fiscals... stealing 4000gL of oxygen may keep you in 02 for months but if you miss and hit the tanks on the freighter you are trying to pin down...with a plasma round.... you can kiss your arse goodbye.
I maybe just as easy to buy the 02.... but you need some more credits... better go knock off another Spoo shipment and sell it on the black market at Callirian... [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img]
A freighter group could spend perhaps three days in real time traversing the distance between SpaceOne and an outlying colony... at any time.. a crew of pirates in say Hamburg in Germany decide to try thier luck and steal it.... (the AI on the vessel flags an attack by the pirates to Bucaneer HQ... and a 'response team' either decides to let the AI fight it out... or 'animates' the dead eyed AI crew and gives the Hamburg Hotdogs a run for their credits...
Action heads fight in thier snub fighters... pasting the external defences... then the 'Leech' drops a load of boarding troopers onto the freighter to take control of the vessel completely.. or maybe just shut down engineering, or eject the cargo pods for the Pirates haulers to pick up and spirit them away.... ( the punters could have say three 'avatars' on the pirate vessel... a specialist capital class engineer, a fighter pilot, and a grunt for boarding actions... )and it all has to happen fast... because an SSL fast response team will either 'animate' the crew.... or a bunch of military or police vessels may jump in to spoil the party... with any luck the crew are out like lights and are snuggled up in thier escape pods and the pirates can run away with the WHOLE vessel.... ( but they of course need to repair/refit/supply her.... [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img] )
Then theres the issue of "where do butterflies go when it rains?" what do you do with a Pirate vessel at 3am local 'real-time' ? The pirates either need a good safe spacedock at one of the out of the way ports... or a hideout in an asteroid belt somewhere.... but they need lots of reseources to maintain.... basically a mondo huge ship that needs all the things a regular pirate cutter needs in vast ammounts...
~~~~~~~~~
ok.... I think I've allready said too much, even if it is pretty broad strokes of an idea...but here... I think I can voice my ideas without finding them stolen...
comments, additions and input please !
This fukker is massive...... and the logistics, the people and the risk are mondo huge....
but man.......
You can forget having any other Sci-fi experience that would even come close....
A few probs tho: Say I and my crew of 9 friends here in Sweden decide to make a cargo run from our home planet to that high-price planet way out in the intergalactic suburbs. The trip would take perhaps 4 days real time. We hire 4 npc merchants, 10 maintainance robots and a force of 10 defencive robots. Off we go.
On the first two days i all goes well, but on the third day a team of pirates in California decide theyd like to get their hands on our cargo. They are not far away, and assemble a strike team to assault our vessel. On day four, they arrive at 8 pm west coast time (I forget its name) that is about 6 am here in Sweden. So, from having 34 crew members, we now have 24 crew only. The pirates have a crew of 20 and proceed to slaughter our 10 defence robots first and then all else. Our cargo is lost to the pirstes, hell, they even take the ship. [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/smile.gif[/img]
Were are our characters now? are they captured?
I would definitely play that game tho [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/smile.gif[/img]
[quote]I dunno fellas, I thought we'd pretty much nailed down the concept work for a storyAI[/quote
I completely disagree - we're only just scratching the surface. I ended up thinking a day or two ago about dramatic presentation, and how it differs depending on the desired emotions of the audience/plexor - whether the plexor should be feeling the same emotion as his character, or whether we should see the character's emotion but feel a totally different one... Think last-scene-of-Planet-of-the-Apes (the original one; I haven't seen the remake). The guy realises he's on Earth and feels anger/sadness at what we've done to it, where the audience is compelled to feel something different - dread. There were certain techniques used to do that, and a really good drama engine should be able to use similar techniques... but that's for further discussion.
Messiah:
[quote]A few probs tho:[/quote]
I agree fully with the problem you've mentioned - it takes some clever conniving to avoid that one.
There's a further problem. The suggestion is to have human writers controlling the story, but you also admit how hard it can be for just one game master to write on-the-go for a few players - how do you cope with a world with thousands of players all expecting a decent part of the story? Even if only important NPCs are human controlled, how do you serve as many people as you get in a MMORPG? How do you keep consistancy between the number of game masters needed? It blows out of proportion altogether too fast, unless the story is such high-level that the players cannot influence it to any huge degree, or individually.
I also disagree that we've nailed a design for an interactive drama/ storyworld engine (s). therefore I think it's too early to begin adding narrative, even if just as an example. We're still at the abstract design level. Here are some problems that need to be addressed, and I'm sure there are more.
I think that the tension between an open-ended storyworld and the needs of drama/narrative could be debated more. It seems that these two needs are opposed and clever compromises need to be designed to address this problem.
Given that the experiencer is allowed choice in the nature of story that will unfold, that there will be a drama engine, a story engine, an umbrella engine, (as discussed and described earlier as examples) a 3-act structure, and a real-time 3D engine that can create any setting, we still don’t know [i]how [/i]narrative will be created, or how it will be communicated.
[i]How[/i] will a program [i]create[/i] narrative elements? Or will this program pull selectively from pre-written narrative elements, which are designed to be components, that can be arranged and re-arranged in various ways?
If the second method is used, how do we address the fact that the experiencer has choice in the kind of story that will unfold? In other words, how can there possibly be enough of the right kind of story elements to suite the whim of the experiencer without necessitating a database to pull from the size of the national library?
[i]How[/i] will a program create dialogue, much less inspired, moving dialogue? What are the NPC’s going to say? [i]What[/i] is going to be on that newspaper we can read? Where does that narrative information come from?
[i]How[/i] are the NPC’s going to say whatever it is that they say? Will they speak? With there be text that represents what they say? If they speak, where will their voices come from? Synthetic voices? Can we be moved by NPC’s with synthetic voices? And [i]can[/i] we be moved by synthetic actors?
We’ve talked about the propagation of information throughout the storyworld, but where does this information come from originally?
If we remember that moving drama (and thus moving storytelling) is the synergistic integration of narrative material that starts at the innermost realm of subtext, then dialogue, then scene, then rhythm and context of scenes, then acts, where all narrative material is connected to a theme, and also must contribute efficiently to moving the drama/story forward, then we must realize that we are, as Grant said, just scratching the surface at this point. How in the hell do we get code to do these things?
[This message has been edited by Randy (edited 11-08-2001).]
It may be a simplification, but the command structure described for ITF seems to be a starting point. The whole concept of [i]strategy[/i] was borken into sub-components, which where further broken down. Could the same methodology be applied to the dramatic elements? Replace strategy with theme, then work backwards.
I hope that doesn't sound too glib. I know there is [i]much[/i] more involved, but we have to start somewhere.
I'm at work now...I'll have to think about thie more later.
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bobo
<*>
B5:ITF
Biggles<font color=#AAFFAA>The Man Without a Face</font>
[quote]How in the hell do we get code to do these things?[/quote]
This is the big problem I've been having all along. How can a computer [i]create[/i] a story? It would take some very complex AI built around the ideas of drama. It would need to be designed so that it had goals of creating story elements that would meet certain aspects of dramatic elements.
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[b][url="http://www.minbari.co.uk/log12.2263/"]Required reading[/url][/b]
Never eat anything bigger than your own head.
The Balance provides. The Balance protects.
"Nonono...Is not [i]Great[/i] Machine. Is...[i]Not[/i]-so-Great Machine. It make good snow cone though." - Zathras
sod it... I have alot to say and no time to say it... I'll be back...
a few bits of housekeeping tho...
just personally I feel its best to have a example to hang the metaphoricals and theoreticals on... I'd rather play with lego than draw pictures of what I want to make with it... if you get my meaning...
For my small brains sake I'll continue to use my example... and you can either extract the theory from it or just go along... either way I have to stick to 'something-I-can-touch' or my mind will do exactly what it did when I made it try to calculus... melt... [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img]
My school didn't have programming classes. I learnt at home on my C64 with books from the library.
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[b][url="http://www.minbari.co.uk/log12.2263/"]Required reading[/url][/b]
Never eat anything bigger than your own head.
The Balance provides. The Balance protects.
"Nonono...Is not [i]Great[/i] Machine. Is...[i]Not[/i]-so-Great Machine. It make good snow cone though." - Zathras
Each and every storyverse should be mapped onto a globe both in terms of a techincal database and story elements/narrative...
a punter travels from pole to pole... exploring his lattitudes as hes sees fit... until of course he circumnavigates the 'globe' and gets back to the same patch of experience/information.
I tested it by running movies and plays over this model... it works... beginning, middle end... scene set,(you can only go South from the North pole)conflict,(the equator), resolution ( the South pole ).
I hung all sorts of additional shit I'd worked out on this framework but in essence its the 'globe' that matters...
I think the biggest stumbling block we face with this is commiting to a making the better mousetrap that we think may be right... and pushing it till it busts rather than keep drawing blueprints...
Reductive reasoning... it works better than cumulative reasoning for me... carve away all the bits that arent the perfect 'story-engine'.
I therefore offer this 'lump of clay' the 'globe-model' theory...
Light NZ/Messiah... ahhh young grasshoppers... I have that one nailed down with a little bit of 'sleight of plot device'.
In the Bucaneers universe the reason the pirates get the unfortunate job of looking for new hyperspace routes/new places to colonise is that hyperspace is riddled with hyperstorms... ( the other sides of blackholes, which incidentally have no spatial relationship to realspace ) going near one is certain suicide... they have to be carefully mapped.. beaconed and navigated around... to do so means hopping out into realspace for a length of time.... in some places 10 seconds.. in others... maybe six hours...
(so the punter can 'convieniently' be online when one of these bridgepoints is coming up and they can take a punt on a pirate crew not being there... or being there in force to nick their gear.)
Surveying is a time consuming and difficult process, and expensive in terms or labour, life and resources. Pirates used to be legit 'prospectors', some still are, and rely on handouts and research grants and the like... the thing is that the fickle and capricious nature of hyperspace means that it is a collosally huge risk... with potentially no gain at all... ( a longer hyperspace route for instance ). So not many companies want to take it on... they rely on the entrepeneurial activities of the pirates to find them new routes and colonisable planets... and when the Pirates do.... they have a natural right to lie in wait for the big phat ships to come through thier patch... the companies turn a good natured blind eye to the pirates... they are simply 'stealing stationery from work' so to speak... and pirate attacks are factored into the accounts...
so everyone wins in the end...
Pirates and merchanters have stoushes but the very symbiotic nature of what they do means they might bloody each others noses but they do not kill each other...
( which is a beautiful thing... less violence... a chivalrous code... and the player doesnt have to 'suspend reality' too much by having his character/s respawn every two minutes without a scratch... )
And as far as being captured... into the brig... and into a holding facility at the nearest spaceport were the bounty on your head is paid to the merchanter crew... ( to make sure they let you go.. back into the system )
Your ship is impounded, stripped of all the illegal and high powered whizzer gear and given back to you after you have paid your bail/fines.
And you start again... go legit as a merchanter or go stealin again... [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img]
So some merchanters who pay big enough 'licence fees' could hook up 70 ion cannons to a second reactor in the cargo bay and turn into bounty hunters.. chasing pirate crews either by baiting them with other ships or having their ship fitted out as a Q ship...( I mentioned these above. )
Or just ship cargo... in bulk with big ferkin defenses or whippet like with tiny expensive commodities in a 'Millenium Falcon'...
Or maybe you just like fightin so you pick on other pirate crews and try to steal all thier hard won loot... [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img]
Each has its merits...
If for some reason your character gets Vacced or something nasty happens... well... you can always rejoin your crew at the next port as a cabinboy again, and be ridiculed and rodgered for dying so badly last time...
Any more questions ?
Hey Biggles... is it possible for you to pull a thread apart ? say pick out the posts with Bucaneers in them and put them into a new thread ?
anyways... ciao...
Biggles<font color=#AAFFAA>The Man Without a Face</font>
I could, but that would require much hacking of the cgi script the board runs on, and we all know how fragile these boards are at the best of times. [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/smile.gif[/img]
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[b][url="http://www.minbari.co.uk/log12.2263/"]Required reading[/url][/b]
Never eat anything bigger than your own head.
The Balance provides. The Balance protects.
"Nonono...Is not [i]Great[/i] Machine. Is...[i]Not[/i]-so-Great Machine. It make good snow cone though." - Zathras
I could ramble heaps on what [i]my[/i] plans are for getting things working, but I said a while back that I'm going to shut up a bit, so I won't. [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/smile.gif[/img]
I will say that a strong base character interaction system that really focuses on character feelings will help a great deal. Human interactions are classic and central for most drama. Creating characters whose feelings can be understood and effected by a plexor will enhance drama no end.
As proof of concept, I offer soap operas. If strong feelings weren't important to drama, they wouldn't exist. [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/smile.gif[/img]
bobo:
[quote]It may be a simplification, but the command structure described for ITF seems to be a starting point. The whole concept of strategy was borken into sub-components, which where further broken down. Could the same methodology be applied to the dramatic elements? Replace strategy with theme, then work backwards.[/quote]
That's pretty much what I have my sights on. Break theme into simple components. Break components into more components. It will require a lot of levels of simplification before the drama as a whole can be made, but that's ok. Going in many small-but-sensible stages is possibly the only way of reaching interactive drama without the need for an AI with an [i]understanding[/i] of humans and the world.
Biggles:
[quote]My school didn't have programming classes. I learnt at home on my C64 with books from the library.[/quote]
Sword M23 (anyone recognise that name?) and ZX Spectrum for me. [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img] I had a programming class in sixth form (that's the level of a 15 year old in school, for non-NZers) but I knew more than the teacher, so it was a bit pointless.
shadow boxer:
[quote]I have that one nailed down with a little bit of 'sleight of plot device'.[/quote]
Good system. I had a similar problem with a multiplayer space game I was once designing, and the solution I came up with was letting the server's AI pull the player's ships back into "safe" space, holding as a reserve fleet until the player returned.
[quote]Any more questions ?[/quote]
You still haven't answered my one about how a MMORPG can have in-depth story and worthwhile human-controlled NPCs without a plethora of writers.
in a nutshell LightNz.. it cant... you need a large team of backroom boys interacting with the punters... you can of course shunt some of the work off onto AI daemons to do some of it...but you still need a captain and some command staff on the bridge so to speak 24/7
Ok. [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/smile.gif[/img]
Final question. Why do you keep calling me LightNZ? AFAIK, there's a LightNZ (or something, my memory fades) on these forums who is quite separate to me...
sorry man... its a case of me having a really bad memory for names... atrocious in fact... and when I post a reply... of course I cant see the name I'm supposed to be addressing.. and then I dont bother checking afterwards...
again, my apologies... I got LightNZ stuck in my head and somehow I grafted it onto you.
You rock GRANT.. [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img]
Biggles<font color=#AAFFAA>The Man Without a Face</font>
Even AI daemons would have a lot of trouble keeping up with thousands of players online at once and making sure that the tens of thousands more who arn't still have their "life" there when they get back online. You would probably need one for every player (or maybe every ship), which is a rather large amount of computing power.
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[b][url="http://www.minbari.co.uk/log12.2263/"]Required reading[/url][/b]
Never eat anything bigger than your own head.
The Balance provides. The Balance protects.
"Nonono...Is not [i]Great[/i] Machine. Is...[i]Not[/i]-so-Great Machine. It make good snow cone though." - Zathras
which is pretty steep... just how many of those are meat and which are silicon is a point of debate...
you also need to remember that basically the GM is there to dispense 'story', not referee or really control any of the punters directly.
you are right... this has the potential to get right out of hand... massive oversubscription
the thing is... with very tight and clever franchising ( horrible word but it drips cash ) bucaneer servers could be branched of the main genuine Bucaneer worlds... the new franchises become new systems/planets/hyperspace routes... which is where the pirate enterpeneuring/exploring comes in... if the punters meet the required standards they can 'attach' thier routes and worlds to the Bucaneer ones... so that takes some of the pressure of the Bucaneer company...
but still... we are talking massive ammounts of people in virtual admin... but I still think the rewards still far outweigh any problems we may encounter...
can you imagine 120-500 systems....Terra and perhaps 20 main colonies run by 'us' and the rest... to varying standards no doubt... by third parties...
and I thought I explained how one maintained a 'life' on line... 'secret pirate bases'...hyperstorm bridges where the actual action of the game usually takes place...
(and folks I am not deliberately leading this thread away from AI... if you'd like me to continue the concept in a new thread thats fine by me)
Biggles<font color=#AAFFAA>The Man Without a Face</font>
How dear you have a yellow folder! Bad thread! BAD! Get back up the top RIGHT NOW! I COMMAND THEE!
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[b][url="http://www.minbari.co.uk/log12.2263/"]Required reading[/url][/b]
Never eat anything bigger than your own head.
The Balance provides. The Balance protects.
"Nonono...Is not [i]Great[/i] Machine. Is...[i]Not[/i]-so-Great Machine. It make good snow cone though." - Zathras
The more I think about this, the less I am convinced that an AI can a)create drama or b)control an NPC enough to make him seem real.
We humans are too adapted to detecting what is and isn't human behavior; we start from before birth and refine from there.
The only way I see to create a [i]practical[/i] system is to use an alien environment or reduced system.
[list]
[*]In an alien system, the player [i]expects[/i] the interaction to be non-intuitive, so you use that to your advantage.
[*]In a reduced system, you present a familiar environment in a simplified manner. The example that comes to mind is in anime, when there are the normaly drawn characters, and every now and then, a simplified, cutsie-type rendering of the character is presented, usualy when an exagerated action is happening. The cutsie-character is not constrained to the same physical rules as the "real" character. (Sorry if the example makes no sense; I'll work on another).
[/list]
I say that these are the only two [i]practical[/i] solutions, because, for economic reasons, I don't see how shadow boxer's GM/punter model would be able to be supported. As Rick and the other number crunchers can tell you, the major cost of any program is the personnel costs; hardware and other resources are cheap. The more people you have on a program, the harder it is to meet the bottom line.
If the GM/punter model were bsaed on all volunteer labor, then it might work, but only for a small group. (shadow boxer, please don't take this as raining on your parade...you're always tinking outside the box, which is a good thing).
I'm waiting for Grant to tell us how his machine will create and communicate narrative - not theme - not act breaks - but "story stuff" - words. And how will those story words be communicated to the plexor? And how will those words become a story with a beginning, middle full of conflict, and satisfying end?
Bobo: I think that both of your ideas are good. In my back-burner design, where the experiencer joins in an adventure with characters who live on the other side of the monitor glass, the characters are synthetic but alive and live in a synthetic but real universe. It doesn’t matter that they aren’t human, because they are set up in the beginning to be other than human, but nevertheless “alive”. It’s all first person POV. Somehow the experiencer’s computer is attached to a floating box in the synthetic world, which allows the experiencer to move around and explore and find ways to help the “people” s/he meets. You may be interested in taking a look at the Haptek site. You’ll have to download their engine, but it’s worth it to check out their technology. ( [url="http://www.haptek.com/"]http://www.haptek.com/[/url] ) I’m seriously considering them as a front end to express my storyworld engine.
[quote]We humans are too adapted to detecting what is and isn't human behavior; we start from before birth and refine from there.[/quote]
Agreed. Which is why we shouldn't try to recreate truly human behavior.
Even movies have this problem to an extent though - the phenomenon known as "bad acting." Most movies have at least a couple of actors that aren't fully believable as their characters, especially if you watch the movie many times.
My priority is to create a human system. This has two aspects. Firstly, the system is too complex for a plexor to write down, too random to guess, but too structured to appear random. Secondly, the system is driven by NPC feelings in a way that is obvious to the plexor. The NPCs may not act human, but they have feelings, memories, plans, and chaos, and so at least give the appearance of being alive.
If the NPCs consider themselves important, that may earn the respect of the plexor. I respected the enemies in HalfLife a lot more on the rare occasions where they fled and regrouped. A story world should be one where the NPC can really get into trouble if he doesn't respect other people as important, in more than trivial ways. And I don't just mean NPCs "switching off" past their anger threshhold.
I'm outta time, I'll respond to Randy later. Quickly though, narrative/dialogue is based around a simple abstract game-internal language, with phrases such as: (phrases within ## symbols represent "words" in the internal language) [i](Edit: I tried using angled brackets instead of hashes first... and that didn't really work. [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/wink.gif[/img] )[/i]
#I# #am upset# #due to #attribute# being too low#
That abstract phrase is converted to real words depending on personality et al...
[i]Edit: Finishing this off...[/i]
Each attribute/plan/memory type would have different mini-phrases used, chosen randomly, or chosen to suit the character's personality, or chosen to enhance drama. Fuzzy logic could play a good part there.
I'm planning on speech synthesis for the word presentation. After a lot of experimenting I found a synthesis system that can actually handle accentuation and emotion, if you carefully craft the input. Like most parts of all this, it won't be simple, but not overly complex - mainly time consuming.
Have I missed anything? I'm tired so I'm just winging it. [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img]
[This message has been edited by GrantNZ (edited 11-13-2001).]
Biggles<font color=#AAFFAA>The Man Without a Face</font>
I agree that AI won't be able to produce fully real human characters in the near future. Your solution of using alien characters, where they are expected to be different, is quite good. But I do not believe that we can't create human characters anyway. They don't have to be perfectly believable, they just have to be capable of creating emotional responces in the plexor and carrying the story. They also need to appear to be acting for a reason, not just idly walking around killing people/selling stuff/jumping off bridges. As the others said, they have to look alive, not simulated.
My game is going to have human characters, not alien, so I expect to end up spending a lot of time in a few years trying to make AI more believable. Either that or paying someone else to. [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/smile.gif[/img]
[b]Grant:[/b]
Alive, got that covered.
The idea of miny phrases is quite good. You could have a database system that contained the phrases. Then, when a character needed to compose something to say, it could look up the database and pick out the words it needs that meet certain criteria. For example, "I" would be needed if they are refering to themselves. Other phrases would be chosen based on what the character is saying, eg telling the plexor about something they saw, or how they are feeling. Fuzzy logic would also help here, as you mentioned, allowing for variation in the way characters say things. Having every character in the world tell you how they are feeling in the same way is not very believable, while having one say "Not to bad!" while another says "Great, apart from..." and yet another says "Goddamn I hate this life..." is far more believable.
This database would be large though, so it would need to be well designed to provide quick lookup times.
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[b][url="http://www.minbari.co.uk/log12.2263/"]Required reading[/url][/b]
Never eat anything bigger than your own head.
The Balance provides. The Balance protects.
"Nonono...Is not [i]Great[/i] Machine. Is...[i]Not[/i]-so-Great Machine. It make good snow cone though." - Zathras
Yep. But the good thing with speech synthesis is that a sentence can be stored in 100-200 bytes. And it's not a slow process to convert from text to speech.
Ohh I'll just add that having a supply of phrases isn't enough in itself. The drama/conversation engine needs to understand what was just said, in order to give the plexor a valid range of replies.
So the conversation engine would marry with the speech engine.
Biggles<font color=#AAFFAA>The Man Without a Face</font>
I actually meant the database will be large in terms of number of entries, not data size. Speech synthesis is a good idea though.
It's pretty much given that the drama engine will need to understand sentences both from the plexor and those it compiles itself, as anything said by anybody could affect anyone who hears it.
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[b][url="http://www.minbari.co.uk/log12.2263/"]Required reading[/url][/b]
Never eat anything bigger than your own head.
The Balance provides. The Balance protects.
"Nonono...Is not [i]Great[/i] Machine. Is...[i]Not[/i]-so-Great Machine. It make good snow cone though." - Zathras
Was just thinking about shadow boxer's idea... the writers could write stories using events and triggers rather than deliberate alterations near players. That way, the story can be "replayed" for other players that go through the same triggers.
Biggles<font color=#AAFFAA>The Man Without a Face</font>
That implies a single player universe. I think the idea he is aiming for is everyone in the same universe. Because traps and triggers would have the same effect for each player, then if they are all in the same universe then what you would see is the same events happening over and over again at different times.
------------------
[b][url="http://www.minbari.co.uk/log12.2263/"]Required reading[/url][/b]
Never eat anything bigger than your own head.
The Balance provides. The Balance protects.
"Nonono...Is not [i]Great[/i] Machine. Is...[i]Not[/i]-so-Great Machine. It make good snow cone though." - Zathras
Comments
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[b][url="http://www.minbari.co.uk/log12.2263/"]Required reading[/url][/b]
Never eat anything bigger than your own head.
The Balance provides. The Balance protects.
"Nonono...Is not [i]Great[/i] Machine. Is...[i]Not[/i]-so-Great Machine. It make good snow cone though." - Zathras
The actual engineering of the AI, is I think best left to Biggles, John and those fellows with the big logical hemispheres... which certainly aint me.. [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img]
I think the concept is sound... the way it works in theory is good to go... now its a case of hard wiring the damn thing to make it go... thats why I shifted the topic slightly...I cant see much merit in laying bricks now... we have the basic 'ready-for-blueprint' drawings...the actual implementation of the AI is for paid time later.. [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img]
I've had alot of time to think.. I've been doing some subcontract signwriting with a three inch brush and 900 square yards of warehouse wall.. suffice to say my brain is not required to be on task for 90% of the time.. so it wanders off and builds game universes... and bits of unpainted wall make for great note taking.. [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img] So...
now to expand on what I said in the previous post...
So anyways... the 'brains-trust' builds a sooperdooper AI to make a nice game... now if it has as much grunt as we've been crediting it with... it will be excellent for a nice freeform kind of experience... a world with just enough structure to keep things going... and loose enough to allow the punter to feel as if he had a place in the timeline/story... lets take that as a given...
A game such as this would be a perfect prologue... the game AI is intelligent enough to feed the beginnings of a story to the punter...basically it is boot camp and introduction in one... the punter becomes immersed in a new universe.. gets past the 'training wheels' bit, knows how to fight/play/live in this universe... and he/she gets a taste of a bigger world that awaits on-line... a couple of droids land in thier lap with a holgraphic message for some "Obi-wan dude"..;D
Now I am not in the slightest bit putting down a silicon based storyteller... but I think it is ultimately just another good tool... the little winding key on a much bigger can of sardines...
A proper... five year story arc and an evolving and fluid universe... and in the back somewhere there is a tempreture controlled room with row upon row of nutrient tanks all filled with clones of Randy...guiding and shaping the story as the punters experience it...
It would be F ucking tough work... I've done enough GMing with paper and dice based games... and trust me... sometimes all your carefully wrtten notes are for squat when your deviant characters do someting completely and utterly unexpected...
For instance... they are supposed to go meet a contact at a nightclub... instead they launch a Light-Anti-Tank-Weapon through the window because the antagonist is talking to thier contact...
and you were going to relate about 70% of your story hook through that contact...
You have to fly by the seat of your pants... and man... its just like any other adrenaline sport... it scares the shit out of you and its the best fun you can have... [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img]
Atleast with an online game their are some paramaeters to fetter in the punter... some of the walls are solid and all the doors have something behind them... unlike a Paper and Dice RPG where there can be nothing but dark vacuum until one of the players wants to open it... ( thats all metaphor folks but I'm sure you follow )
There are a million little GM's maxims, himts and tips that apply but thats getting away from the basic concept...
I think it best both commercially and in terms of progress to do a good deal with AI... but do the best that can be done to really bring the game alive... and that means meat online... the ole Sapien mark one is the best computer out there...
The biggest snag with talking about this kind of online Storyverse is it is very hard to talk in metaphorical hypotheticals... so I'm going to dump the gist of the universe on the bottom of this post... and tie back to it with what I'm on about above.
ok...
Bucaneers - (working title)
background in a nutshell
- think Babylon Five done by MGM when Errol Flynn was the leading man of choice... swashbuckling, honour bound, dashing heroes and heroines...with more Buck Rodgers 'built to last' 1950's valve and bus-bar driven technology, highly sophisticated but bulletproof.
- small tramp freighters and merchant spaceships traverse vast stretches of space between colonies...
- they are preyed upon by pirates...( the punters )
- in return, the pirates are honour bound to open up new routes and do the hard yakka prospecting and exploring, hence creating more traffic, and giving them more targets to plunder and suppport thier livelihoods...
Now... the single player game could be( just as an idea for this universe ), the punter starting off as a 'young man running of to sea/space' to seek his fortune... joins a crew on a merchanter...does his fare share of swabbing decks and all the other hazing rituals ( basic training in the games flight engine, ( say Starfury-like for convienence ), then managing basic resources like life support/fuel etc, ( valuable lessons needed to maintain a vessel in the storyverse online..
and so it goes... learning all the ropes...
Then a pirate vessel strikes... he learns how to fight... the pirates took on too big a target, namely the punters freighter crew/captain and got thier arses kicked. During the action the punter repels a boarding action.. ( a first taste of a FPS type game with a GENUINE POINT... ie not simply a fragfest or 'capture the flag'... if your vessel is taken over... or the pirates manage to force the ship to eject its cargo pods then you lose your job or a huge pay cut/demotion/get fired... The punter learns that there are more than one way to subjugate and control a vessel other than brute force and destroying it.
The captain takes the 'boy' aside and shows him the tactical holofield.. ( an ITF or Homeworld skirmish action engine ) and he learns more about the wiles of a life on the 'lanes. ( Foghorn Leghorn voice/SPACE lanes, that is/ Foghorn voice. )
The pirate vessel's crew is brought aboard, leaving the door open to more exposure to the Piratical way of life from the scurvy spacedogs in the brig... and also drops a few choice 'clues' in the punters lap... about the direction of the story... which he will find online eventually...
To close off the prologue, the punter finds his current Captain is not going to retire anytime soon... and if the punter wants to get any further up the food chain than First mate... then he better go find himself a gig on another vessel... or spend his savings on a pile of junk like an ancient YT1300 (the tiny tramp freighter design on which the Millenium Falcon is based) and strike out on his own... and the first place he goes is to SpaceOne.... the monty huge spaceport/warehouse/whorehouse/alehouse/outhouse on dear ole Luna... to look on the 'job boards' and 'auction sheets' for a new adventure ( this is the online server...hopefully populus with vast numbers of old Vaccs( read old salts ) ready to 'do over' a new crewmember... )
Here the beauracratic engine....the police and military are the 'Randycopies' tools to control the PC's. The media and the corporate bodies in residence offer the money/ships/contacts/equipment and all the other rigmarole needed to get the punter into space... probably with a huge debt to work off, (or shirk out of.. [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img]) but something is amiss... someone is pasting and wasting both pirate and freighter alike.... aside from the day to day to and fro of stealing and dodging and living.... something is not right in the storyverse.... the holovids are full of reports of vessels and wayports being destroyed... (I think you know the way things go from here... )
Perhaps this one particular punter is going to be one of the lucky ones.... one of the people lucky enough to experience this new threat first hand.... a big black nasty Q ship... ( WW2 merchant ship festooned with hidden weapons designed to sink and destroy unwary vessels both merchant and military.... ) being crewed by GMPC's from Bucaneer HQ... this is as much a battle as a key event in the storyverses timeline... what happens this day will ripple through the storyverse when the lucky pirate makes it to the next wayport an reports what happened on the Pirates BB... or maybe they wont say a thing.. and it will be the next punter who drops the next clue for the Storyverse to continue....
And oh yeah..... nothing wrong with true cooperative play... takes alot of crew to look after a big vessel.... and nothing shoots/flies/fights better than a meat crewmember.... gun turrets, reactors, boarding shuttles,fighters and all manner of things always work better with crew rather than HNPC's.... if you want to tackle on of those monty huge bulk carriers on the major spacelanes then you better learn how to work together.... because you need a big ship to steal big ships.. ( or atleast ALOT of little ones )
The scale of this is vast.... local Bucaneer servers are mirrored in the Storyverse as spaceports... major ones along the trade routes between colonies....huge ammounts of recruiting would need to be done to swell the ranks of the Bucaneer company... there is always going to be alot of "us-and-them"... SSL (Star and Sattelite Logistics corporation) would be the storyverse 'front' for Bucaneers, sending out targets for the pirates... selling new ships, weapons....supplies etc etc.
Pirates would have to carefully weigh up targets.... work out the fiscals... stealing 4000gL of oxygen may keep you in 02 for months but if you miss and hit the tanks on the freighter you are trying to pin down...with a plasma round.... you can kiss your arse goodbye.
I maybe just as easy to buy the 02.... but you need some more credits... better go knock off another Spoo shipment and sell it on the black market at Callirian... [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img]
A freighter group could spend perhaps three days in real time traversing the distance between SpaceOne and an outlying colony... at any time.. a crew of pirates in say Hamburg in Germany decide to try thier luck and steal it.... (the AI on the vessel flags an attack by the pirates to Bucaneer HQ... and a 'response team' either decides to let the AI fight it out... or 'animates' the dead eyed AI crew and gives the Hamburg Hotdogs a run for their credits...
Action heads fight in thier snub fighters... pasting the external defences... then the 'Leech' drops a load of boarding troopers onto the freighter to take control of the vessel completely.. or maybe just shut down engineering, or eject the cargo pods for the Pirates haulers to pick up and spirit them away.... ( the punters could have say three 'avatars' on the pirate vessel... a specialist capital class engineer, a fighter pilot, and a grunt for boarding actions... )and it all has to happen fast... because an SSL fast response team will either 'animate' the crew.... or a bunch of military or police vessels may jump in to spoil the party... with any luck the crew are out like lights and are snuggled up in thier escape pods and the pirates can run away with the WHOLE vessel.... ( but they of course need to repair/refit/supply her.... [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img] )
Then theres the issue of "where do butterflies go when it rains?" what do you do with a Pirate vessel at 3am local 'real-time' ? The pirates either need a good safe spacedock at one of the out of the way ports... or a hideout in an asteroid belt somewhere.... but they need lots of reseources to maintain.... basically a mondo huge ship that needs all the things a regular pirate cutter needs in vast ammounts...
~~~~~~~~~
ok.... I think I've allready said too much, even if it is pretty broad strokes of an idea...but here... I think I can voice my ideas without finding them stolen...
comments, additions and input please !
This fukker is massive...... and the logistics, the people and the risk are mondo huge....
but man.......
You can forget having any other Sci-fi experience that would even come close....
A few probs tho: Say I and my crew of 9 friends here in Sweden decide to make a cargo run from our home planet to that high-price planet way out in the intergalactic suburbs. The trip would take perhaps 4 days real time. We hire 4 npc merchants, 10 maintainance robots and a force of 10 defencive robots. Off we go.
On the first two days i all goes well, but on the third day a team of pirates in California decide theyd like to get their hands on our cargo. They are not far away, and assemble a strike team to assault our vessel. On day four, they arrive at 8 pm west coast time (I forget its name) that is about 6 am here in Sweden. So, from having 34 crew members, we now have 24 crew only. The pirates have a crew of 20 and proceed to slaughter our 10 defence robots first and then all else. Our cargo is lost to the pirstes, hell, they even take the ship. [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/smile.gif[/img]
Were are our characters now? are they captured?
I would definitely play that game tho [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/smile.gif[/img]
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[i][b][url="http://www.dd.chalmers.se/~gu00mama/"]http://www.dd.chalmers.se/~gu00mama/[/url]
Vir - Are you saying you don't trust me anymore? I made your favourite, Spoo.
Londo - I'll order in.[/b][/i]
[quote]I dunno fellas, I thought we'd pretty much nailed down the concept work for a storyAI[/quote
I completely disagree - we're only just scratching the surface. I ended up thinking a day or two ago about dramatic presentation, and how it differs depending on the desired emotions of the audience/plexor - whether the plexor should be feeling the same emotion as his character, or whether we should see the character's emotion but feel a totally different one... Think last-scene-of-Planet-of-the-Apes (the original one; I haven't seen the remake). The guy realises he's on Earth and feels anger/sadness at what we've done to it, where the audience is compelled to feel something different - dread. There were certain techniques used to do that, and a really good drama engine should be able to use similar techniques... but that's for further discussion.
Messiah:
[quote]A few probs tho:[/quote]
I agree fully with the problem you've mentioned - it takes some clever conniving to avoid that one.
There's a further problem. The suggestion is to have human writers controlling the story, but you also admit how hard it can be for just one game master to write on-the-go for a few players - how do you cope with a world with thousands of players all expecting a decent part of the story? Even if only important NPCs are human controlled, how do you serve as many people as you get in a MMORPG? How do you keep consistancy between the number of game masters needed? It blows out of proportion altogether too fast, unless the story is such high-level that the players cannot influence it to any huge degree, or individually.
I think that the tension between an open-ended storyworld and the needs of drama/narrative could be debated more. It seems that these two needs are opposed and clever compromises need to be designed to address this problem.
Given that the experiencer is allowed choice in the nature of story that will unfold, that there will be a drama engine, a story engine, an umbrella engine, (as discussed and described earlier as examples) a 3-act structure, and a real-time 3D engine that can create any setting, we still don’t know [i]how [/i]narrative will be created, or how it will be communicated.
[i]How[/i] will a program [i]create[/i] narrative elements? Or will this program pull selectively from pre-written narrative elements, which are designed to be components, that can be arranged and re-arranged in various ways?
If the second method is used, how do we address the fact that the experiencer has choice in the kind of story that will unfold? In other words, how can there possibly be enough of the right kind of story elements to suite the whim of the experiencer without necessitating a database to pull from the size of the national library?
[i]How[/i] will a program create dialogue, much less inspired, moving dialogue? What are the NPC’s going to say? [i]What[/i] is going to be on that newspaper we can read? Where does that narrative information come from?
[i]How[/i] are the NPC’s going to say whatever it is that they say? Will they speak? With there be text that represents what they say? If they speak, where will their voices come from? Synthetic voices? Can we be moved by NPC’s with synthetic voices? And [i]can[/i] we be moved by synthetic actors?
We’ve talked about the propagation of information throughout the storyworld, but where does this information come from originally?
If we remember that moving drama (and thus moving storytelling) is the synergistic integration of narrative material that starts at the innermost realm of subtext, then dialogue, then scene, then rhythm and context of scenes, then acts, where all narrative material is connected to a theme, and also must contribute efficiently to moving the drama/story forward, then we must realize that we are, as Grant said, just scratching the surface at this point. How in the hell do we get code to do these things?
[This message has been edited by Randy (edited 11-08-2001).]
It may be a simplification, but the command structure described for ITF seems to be a starting point. The whole concept of [i]strategy[/i] was borken into sub-components, which where further broken down. Could the same methodology be applied to the dramatic elements? Replace strategy with theme, then work backwards.
I hope that doesn't sound too glib. I know there is [i]much[/i] more involved, but we have to start somewhere.
I'm at work now...I'll have to think about thie more later.
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bobo
<*>
B5:ITF
This is the big problem I've been having all along. How can a computer [i]create[/i] a story? It would take some very complex AI built around the ideas of drama. It would need to be designed so that it had goals of creating story elements that would meet certain aspects of dramatic elements.
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[b][url="http://www.minbari.co.uk/log12.2263/"]Required reading[/url][/b]
Never eat anything bigger than your own head.
The Balance provides. The Balance protects.
"Nonono...Is not [i]Great[/i] Machine. Is...[i]Not[/i]-so-Great Machine. It make good snow cone though." - Zathras
a few bits of housekeeping tho...
just personally I feel its best to have a example to hang the metaphoricals and theoreticals on... I'd rather play with lego than draw pictures of what I want to make with it... if you get my meaning...
For my small brains sake I'll continue to use my example... and you can either extract the theory from it or just go along... either way I have to stick to 'something-I-can-touch' or my mind will do exactly what it did when I made it try to calculus... melt... [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img]
And what did I program while in that class you might ask?
Games!
[img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img]
[img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img]
My school didn't have programming classes. I learnt at home on my C64 with books from the library.
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[b][url="http://www.minbari.co.uk/log12.2263/"]Required reading[/url][/b]
Never eat anything bigger than your own head.
The Balance provides. The Balance protects.
"Nonono...Is not [i]Great[/i] Machine. Is...[i]Not[/i]-so-Great Machine. It make good snow cone though." - Zathras
I JUST TYPED OUT AN HOUR AND A HALFS WORK !
DAMMIT DAMMIT DAMMIT.....
FAAAAARRKK YOU REFRESH KEY !
~~~~~~~
sigh.... ok
in a nutshell.....
Each and every storyverse should be mapped onto a globe both in terms of a techincal database and story elements/narrative...
a punter travels from pole to pole... exploring his lattitudes as hes sees fit... until of course he circumnavigates the 'globe' and gets back to the same patch of experience/information.
I tested it by running movies and plays over this model... it works... beginning, middle end... scene set,(you can only go South from the North pole)conflict,(the equator), resolution ( the South pole ).
I hung all sorts of additional shit I'd worked out on this framework but in essence its the 'globe' that matters...
I think the biggest stumbling block we face with this is commiting to a making the better mousetrap that we think may be right... and pushing it till it busts rather than keep drawing blueprints...
Reductive reasoning... it works better than cumulative reasoning for me... carve away all the bits that arent the perfect 'story-engine'.
I therefore offer this 'lump of clay' the 'globe-model' theory...
doyawurst ! [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img]
In the Bucaneers universe the reason the pirates get the unfortunate job of looking for new hyperspace routes/new places to colonise is that hyperspace is riddled with hyperstorms... ( the other sides of blackholes, which incidentally have no spatial relationship to realspace ) going near one is certain suicide... they have to be carefully mapped.. beaconed and navigated around... to do so means hopping out into realspace for a length of time.... in some places 10 seconds.. in others... maybe six hours...
(so the punter can 'convieniently' be online when one of these bridgepoints is coming up and they can take a punt on a pirate crew not being there... or being there in force to nick their gear.)
Surveying is a time consuming and difficult process, and expensive in terms or labour, life and resources. Pirates used to be legit 'prospectors', some still are, and rely on handouts and research grants and the like... the thing is that the fickle and capricious nature of hyperspace means that it is a collosally huge risk... with potentially no gain at all... ( a longer hyperspace route for instance ). So not many companies want to take it on... they rely on the entrepeneurial activities of the pirates to find them new routes and colonisable planets... and when the Pirates do.... they have a natural right to lie in wait for the big phat ships to come through thier patch... the companies turn a good natured blind eye to the pirates... they are simply 'stealing stationery from work' so to speak... and pirate attacks are factored into the accounts...
so everyone wins in the end...
Pirates and merchanters have stoushes but the very symbiotic nature of what they do means they might bloody each others noses but they do not kill each other...
( which is a beautiful thing... less violence... a chivalrous code... and the player doesnt have to 'suspend reality' too much by having his character/s respawn every two minutes without a scratch... )
And as far as being captured... into the brig... and into a holding facility at the nearest spaceport were the bounty on your head is paid to the merchanter crew... ( to make sure they let you go.. back into the system )
Your ship is impounded, stripped of all the illegal and high powered whizzer gear and given back to you after you have paid your bail/fines.
And you start again... go legit as a merchanter or go stealin again... [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img]
So some merchanters who pay big enough 'licence fees' could hook up 70 ion cannons to a second reactor in the cargo bay and turn into bounty hunters.. chasing pirate crews either by baiting them with other ships or having their ship fitted out as a Q ship...( I mentioned these above. )
Or just ship cargo... in bulk with big ferkin defenses or whippet like with tiny expensive commodities in a 'Millenium Falcon'...
Or maybe you just like fightin so you pick on other pirate crews and try to steal all thier hard won loot... [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img]
Each has its merits...
If for some reason your character gets Vacced or something nasty happens... well... you can always rejoin your crew at the next port as a cabinboy again, and be ridiculed and rodgered for dying so badly last time...
Any more questions ?
Hey Biggles... is it possible for you to pull a thread apart ? say pick out the posts with Bucaneers in them and put them into a new thread ?
anyways... ciao...
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[b][url="http://www.minbari.co.uk/log12.2263/"]Required reading[/url][/b]
Never eat anything bigger than your own head.
The Balance provides. The Balance protects.
"Nonono...Is not [i]Great[/i] Machine. Is...[i]Not[/i]-so-Great Machine. It make good snow cone though." - Zathras
I will say that a strong base character interaction system that really focuses on character feelings will help a great deal. Human interactions are classic and central for most drama. Creating characters whose feelings can be understood and effected by a plexor will enhance drama no end.
As proof of concept, I offer soap operas. If strong feelings weren't important to drama, they wouldn't exist. [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/smile.gif[/img]
bobo:
[quote]It may be a simplification, but the command structure described for ITF seems to be a starting point. The whole concept of strategy was borken into sub-components, which where further broken down. Could the same methodology be applied to the dramatic elements? Replace strategy with theme, then work backwards.[/quote]
That's pretty much what I have my sights on. Break theme into simple components. Break components into more components. It will require a lot of levels of simplification before the drama as a whole can be made, but that's ok. Going in many small-but-sensible stages is possibly the only way of reaching interactive drama without the need for an AI with an [i]understanding[/i] of humans and the world.
Biggles:
[quote]My school didn't have programming classes. I learnt at home on my C64 with books from the library.[/quote]
Sword M23 (anyone recognise that name?) and ZX Spectrum for me. [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img] I had a programming class in sixth form (that's the level of a 15 year old in school, for non-NZers) but I knew more than the teacher, so it was a bit pointless.
shadow boxer:
[quote]I have that one nailed down with a little bit of 'sleight of plot device'.[/quote]
Good system. I had a similar problem with a multiplayer space game I was once designing, and the solution I came up with was letting the server's AI pull the player's ships back into "safe" space, holding as a reserve fleet until the player returned.
[quote]Any more questions ?[/quote]
You still haven't answered my one about how a MMORPG can have in-depth story and worthwhile human-controlled NPCs without a plethora of writers.
Final question. Why do you keep calling me LightNZ? AFAIK, there's a LightNZ (or something, my memory fades) on these forums who is quite separate to me...
again, my apologies... I got LightNZ stuck in my head and somehow I grafted it onto you.
You rock GRANT.. [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img]
------------------
[b][url="http://www.minbari.co.uk/log12.2263/"]Required reading[/url][/b]
Never eat anything bigger than your own head.
The Balance provides. The Balance protects.
"Nonono...Is not [i]Great[/i] Machine. Is...[i]Not[/i]-so-Great Machine. It make good snow cone though." - Zathras
which is pretty steep... just how many of those are meat and which are silicon is a point of debate...
you also need to remember that basically the GM is there to dispense 'story', not referee or really control any of the punters directly.
you are right... this has the potential to get right out of hand... massive oversubscription
the thing is... with very tight and clever franchising ( horrible word but it drips cash ) bucaneer servers could be branched of the main genuine Bucaneer worlds... the new franchises become new systems/planets/hyperspace routes... which is where the pirate enterpeneuring/exploring comes in... if the punters meet the required standards they can 'attach' thier routes and worlds to the Bucaneer ones... so that takes some of the pressure of the Bucaneer company...
but still... we are talking massive ammounts of people in virtual admin... but I still think the rewards still far outweigh any problems we may encounter...
can you imagine 120-500 systems....Terra and perhaps 20 main colonies run by 'us' and the rest... to varying standards no doubt... by third parties...
and I thought I explained how one maintained a 'life' on line... 'secret pirate bases'...hyperstorm bridges where the actual action of the game usually takes place...
(and folks I am not deliberately leading this thread away from AI... if you'd like me to continue the concept in a new thread thats fine by me)
------------------
[b][url="http://www.minbari.co.uk/log12.2263/"]Required reading[/url][/b]
Never eat anything bigger than your own head.
The Balance provides. The Balance protects.
"Nonono...Is not [i]Great[/i] Machine. Is...[i]Not[/i]-so-Great Machine. It make good snow cone though." - Zathras
We humans are too adapted to detecting what is and isn't human behavior; we start from before birth and refine from there.
The only way I see to create a [i]practical[/i] system is to use an alien environment or reduced system.
[list]
[*]In an alien system, the player [i]expects[/i] the interaction to be non-intuitive, so you use that to your advantage.
[*]In a reduced system, you present a familiar environment in a simplified manner. The example that comes to mind is in anime, when there are the normaly drawn characters, and every now and then, a simplified, cutsie-type rendering of the character is presented, usualy when an exagerated action is happening. The cutsie-character is not constrained to the same physical rules as the "real" character. (Sorry if the example makes no sense; I'll work on another).
[/list]
I say that these are the only two [i]practical[/i] solutions, because, for economic reasons, I don't see how shadow boxer's GM/punter model would be able to be supported. As Rick and the other number crunchers can tell you, the major cost of any program is the personnel costs; hardware and other resources are cheap. The more people you have on a program, the harder it is to meet the bottom line.
If the GM/punter model were bsaed on all volunteer labor, then it might work, but only for a small group. (shadow boxer, please don't take this as raining on your parade...you're always tinking outside the box, which is a good thing).
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bobo
<*>
B5:ITF
Bobo: I think that both of your ideas are good. In my back-burner design, where the experiencer joins in an adventure with characters who live on the other side of the monitor glass, the characters are synthetic but alive and live in a synthetic but real universe. It doesn’t matter that they aren’t human, because they are set up in the beginning to be other than human, but nevertheless “alive”. It’s all first person POV. Somehow the experiencer’s computer is attached to a floating box in the synthetic world, which allows the experiencer to move around and explore and find ways to help the “people” s/he meets. You may be interested in taking a look at the Haptek site. You’ll have to download their engine, but it’s worth it to check out their technology. ( [url="http://www.haptek.com/"]http://www.haptek.com/[/url] ) I’m seriously considering them as a front end to express my storyworld engine.
[quote]We humans are too adapted to detecting what is and isn't human behavior; we start from before birth and refine from there.[/quote]
Agreed. Which is why we shouldn't try to recreate truly human behavior.
Even movies have this problem to an extent though - the phenomenon known as "bad acting." Most movies have at least a couple of actors that aren't fully believable as their characters, especially if you watch the movie many times.
My priority is to create a human system. This has two aspects. Firstly, the system is too complex for a plexor to write down, too random to guess, but too structured to appear random. Secondly, the system is driven by NPC feelings in a way that is obvious to the plexor. The NPCs may not act human, but they have feelings, memories, plans, and chaos, and so at least give the appearance of being alive.
If the NPCs consider themselves important, that may earn the respect of the plexor. I respected the enemies in HalfLife a lot more on the rare occasions where they fled and regrouped. A story world should be one where the NPC can really get into trouble if he doesn't respect other people as important, in more than trivial ways. And I don't just mean NPCs "switching off" past their anger threshhold.
I'm outta time, I'll respond to Randy later. Quickly though, narrative/dialogue is based around a simple abstract game-internal language, with phrases such as: (phrases within ## symbols represent "words" in the internal language) [i](Edit: I tried using angled brackets instead of hashes first... and that didn't really work. [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/wink.gif[/img] )[/i]
#I# #am upset# #due to #attribute# being too low#
That abstract phrase is converted to real words depending on personality et al...
[i]Edit: Finishing this off...[/i]
Each attribute/plan/memory type would have different mini-phrases used, chosen randomly, or chosen to suit the character's personality, or chosen to enhance drama. Fuzzy logic could play a good part there.
I'm planning on speech synthesis for the word presentation. After a lot of experimenting I found a synthesis system that can actually handle accentuation and emotion, if you carefully craft the input. Like most parts of all this, it won't be simple, but not overly complex - mainly time consuming.
Have I missed anything? I'm tired so I'm just winging it. [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img]
[This message has been edited by GrantNZ (edited 11-13-2001).]
to the plexor[/quote]
Woo! [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/smile.gif[/img]
[b]bobo:[/b]
I agree that AI won't be able to produce fully real human characters in the near future. Your solution of using alien characters, where they are expected to be different, is quite good. But I do not believe that we can't create human characters anyway. They don't have to be perfectly believable, they just have to be capable of creating emotional responces in the plexor and carrying the story. They also need to appear to be acting for a reason, not just idly walking around killing people/selling stuff/jumping off bridges. As the others said, they have to look alive, not simulated.
My game is going to have human characters, not alien, so I expect to end up spending a lot of time in a few years trying to make AI more believable. Either that or paying someone else to. [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/smile.gif[/img]
[b]Grant:[/b]
Alive, got that covered.
The idea of miny phrases is quite good. You could have a database system that contained the phrases. Then, when a character needed to compose something to say, it could look up the database and pick out the words it needs that meet certain criteria. For example, "I" would be needed if they are refering to themselves. Other phrases would be chosen based on what the character is saying, eg telling the plexor about something they saw, or how they are feeling. Fuzzy logic would also help here, as you mentioned, allowing for variation in the way characters say things. Having every character in the world tell you how they are feeling in the same way is not very believable, while having one say "Not to bad!" while another says "Great, apart from..." and yet another says "Goddamn I hate this life..." is far more believable.
This database would be large though, so it would need to be well designed to provide quick lookup times.
------------------
[b][url="http://www.minbari.co.uk/log12.2263/"]Required reading[/url][/b]
Never eat anything bigger than your own head.
The Balance provides. The Balance protects.
"Nonono...Is not [i]Great[/i] Machine. Is...[i]Not[/i]-so-Great Machine. It make good snow cone though." - Zathras
So the conversation engine would marry with the speech engine.
It's pretty much given that the drama engine will need to understand sentences both from the plexor and those it compiles itself, as anything said by anybody could affect anyone who hears it.
------------------
[b][url="http://www.minbari.co.uk/log12.2263/"]Required reading[/url][/b]
Never eat anything bigger than your own head.
The Balance provides. The Balance protects.
"Nonono...Is not [i]Great[/i] Machine. Is...[i]Not[/i]-so-Great Machine. It make good snow cone though." - Zathras
------------------
[b][url="http://www.minbari.co.uk/log12.2263/"]Required reading[/url][/b]
Never eat anything bigger than your own head.
The Balance provides. The Balance protects.
"Nonono...Is not [i]Great[/i] Machine. Is...[i]Not[/i]-so-Great Machine. It make good snow cone though." - Zathras