Some concept art for Wootanga
We now have a ShoutBox on the front page of the Wootanga Infosite. Here you'll be able to leave comments about the game. You can read more news about Wootanga here.
There's also a new blog in the Developer Diary. You can view the article in full below.
"Gaining Pace
NPCs
As mentioned in the previous Blog, the focus this time is on our Non-Player Characters which, unlike most conventional bots, come equipped with Agent Technology.
Over the last few days, our NPC framework gained so-called constraints, which are conditions that are applied to certain dialogue paths. So, in effect, if you keep repeating yourself, Oraluki might get upset. He'll also remember you the next time you return to him, whether it be an hour, day, week or month.
In addition, the framework was connected to some real world and virtual world information. So it's now theoretically possible for our NPCs to know which town you're from, what time it is there and what the weather's like outside.
The nicest bit at the moment is the mode in which NPCs really communicate with each other, exchanging new information about people they like - just like real people. It may also be that one NPC isn't in the mood to talk with another. It's a really exciting aspect of the library...
As you can see, this project is much more ambitious than the usual bots in online games. Today I even went to the local Graduate School of Dynamic Intelligent Systems for a short chat about agent technology and their different scientific classes.
Shout!
As you will have noticed, the Infosite has now got a shoutbox, where visitors can leave us comments and feedback.
Although this is a rather small addition in appearance, there is of course more going on behind it. In actual fact, this module might well make an appearance in our final site on House pages (Houses being what Guilds are in other games).
Serious backend work has been done on the shoutbox library, allowing export in XML as well as subscribing to shoutbox newsfeeds in more than a dozen variations (not enabled on the Infosite, sorry...)
Bad word filtering
Oh the pain! Why didn't anybody tell us that writing sophisticated bad word filters isn't fun? The code is rather straightforward, but the main problems come up with the data on which they work.
So it wasn't really possible up to now to find some nice lists of dirty words with associated severability. ;)
The simple solution to this is to come up with some lists of our own. Problem solved.
For now I won't be giving any implementation details on this "Ansarra" component so, for the moment, you can pretend it works by magic. I can tell you it's not one of these cheap "if message contains 'bleh' replace that by dots" systems. It's a much more flexible system which will be expanded into a formal text classification system during further development. Science strikes back once again!
Further plans
The next part will be about the technical side of the Avatars along with Inventories and Items. So this will become a rather boring time as it won't require much science... but who knows? ;)
Thomas Heinen
Lead Developer"
Don't forget to visit http://www.wootanga.com and register your email address to receive news and updates about Wootanga and be invited into the Beta once launched.
Anthony
Wootanga - Play Life, Live The Game(TM)
Can your artist pals make a reasonable bulldozer?