quote:Original post by Ysaneya
Looks like the word "Dynamic" is confusing people more than anything else. What about non-deterministic ? I think that''s what the original poster had in mind. A game where events are not scripted, but computed on the fly given the context; a game that can be played differently every time..

A good example is NetHack. In this game the map is different every time you play a new game. The names of the items are all gibberish but the gibberish is different each time and you don''t know the true name until you identify it either by experimenting with it or using a spell on it. The properties of the items are variable although they follow general constraints.

A graphical version of this was the Diablo / Diablo II games.

Im sorry if what I said sounded like a flame...it wasnt intended.

Just pointing out the level of technology. Although that test was done awhile back.

"Why not do away with AI/NPCs altogether (you could only do this with a MMOG of course) and hire people to be the "NPCs". "

Ive been in favor of this for a LONG time. In fantasy land where my game gets funded with billions of dollars, Id hire all types of boys and girls, men and women to play the NPCs in our MMO. They might get tired of handing out quests, but they''d be paid to play a video game.

Definitely agree with you there.

Alfred Norris, VoodooFusion Studios
Team Lead - CONFLICT: Omega
www.conflictomega.com

people think about creating content from any random/procedural/dinamic/whatever you call it algo, but they seems to lose the focus of content is to make meaning, thethese algo must have a meaning layer to create interesting things

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
be good
be evil
but do it WELL
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Predetermained stories and story lines, can be laid out over a generated world very easily. We aren''t talking about the technicals for how a dynamicly generated game would work. The idea of this thread is to think of ideas for games that could use this method of generating levels. We''ve seen many examples in past games, many which are mentioned in this thread allready.

Okay here''s an idea for a real time strategy. More like a Real tactical strategy as i''d like to call it. You control a millitary special ops team in a world of war. Missions are not predetermined at all. The world is in so much chaos that there is allways limitless missions to do. From an isometric view point you control everything. Office buildings, military bunkers, city streets, supermarkets, banks, government buildings, airports, make sure there are dozens and dozens of different tile sets and algorithms to generate battle zones. After every mission, you''re faction gains territory or victory if you''ve won. Other faction relations are calculated, the world borders are adjusted accordingly. The point? To win the war. As a little twist, at any time your special ops team and you could chose to go awol and become mercaneries. Or defect to a faction with better offers. Game mechanics could be similar to fallout tactics, yet it is my opinion that tactics did not fully take advantage of the concept of gameplay it was using. Each level you have to use your training and follow mission code, and you allways start with the same team. Small upgrades could come along, but its not focused on your team learning new things. Its mostly about what equipment your team is wearing at any given time. Heavy or light armour, silent guns? etc.. Does the game need to have an end? Sure the story could have an ultimate win to it, or even plenty of different options for win to it. But the game shouldn''t ever have to be won. The millions of different levels that could come from such a set of tiles and algorithms, along with plenty of different styles of missions and kinds of objectives that could be seen if enough variables were determined, would lead to an extraordinairly huge game of countless number of levels.

quote:Original post by Vanquish
As far as the poster speaking about "realistic" dialog...

There once was a scientific test...the "Turing" test I believe it was called. Which attempted to see if a person got to speak to someone over a computer could tell if it was indeed a person or a computer on the other side.

The computers failed miserably.

Unless you get someone to sit for 9 years and type alternative sentences so each response has a 1 in (pick a number that would exhaust the patience of most people returning to the same NPC - say 100) 100 chance of being read, and then you kept track of not saying the same response twice...

its going to be hard to come up with a game that responds in new and different ways, as regards dialog.

Hmm.. I've spoken to ICQ bots that were quite convincing. Not convincing enough - after a few messages it was obvious, however the grammar was correct and... I think the thing here is that I'm talking about a (singleplayer) RGP where dialogues of both the player and the NPC is generated (but the player obviously gets a choice of what to say), and you're talking about a (multiplayer) RPG where the player would have to type in whatever he wanted to say.

Naturally, the latter is A LOT more difficult to implement. Not to say that my version will be easy, but I do not believe it to be that hard. I wrote down the basic "parts" of a conversation between a character and an NPC in a regular SP RPG (Fallout, Baldur's Gate, Arcanum) with a real dialogue (Morrowind and Wizardry 8 just had different topics you could click on and the NPC would say something about it... very boring).

I think I came up with 8 or 9 parts, including these: Greeting, Introduction, Quick Comment (on the weather or whatever), "I want you to do this quest", Goodbye, and some more.
After that, I wrote a lot of greetings (Hi, hello, hi there, etc) and some different ways to introduce the character (my name is, I am, etc). I then wrote a small program that simply randomized amongst the first and the second and the result were about 20 or 30 different openings which most were pretty good. I even implemented a really simple relation between the characters - if the NPC disliked the player character more than his "careness" variable, he could say something from the "naughty" list of parts.

A quick run in the calculator shows that if there are on average six parts in a dialogue, and there are six different ways that each part can be randomized, there is a total of 46656 combinations. If there are 7 parts and 7 ways / part... 823543 combinations. It grows pretty fast. And yeah, if there were only 7 ways/part on average, the player would learn to recognize them quite fast. So there would have to be more, say 15 (4747561509943 combinations ), plus some 10-30 (depends on the size of the game of course) that were rare.


Anyways, what I'm trying to say is that I do think it's quite possible.

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"Kaka e gott" - Me
Current project: An RPG with tactical, real-time combat with a realistic damage system, and randomly generated world and dialogue.


[edited by - Srekel on December 15, 2003 7:18:41 PM]

As far as the dialog issue goes. I think it would be far easier and possibly more interesting to implement a system where dialog is image based and not text based. Characters would communiacte through a series of images.
For instance you arrive at a burnt out village and find the mayor. You ask what happend and he tells you soilders burned down the village. That could be shown as images, the player shows question mark, action, village and the mayor responds with soilders, fire, village.

It would allow you to comminacte the content without worrying about syntax or grammer. It would also make things easier to generate dynamicaly. Since your just need to show a sequence of images and not have properly formated sentances. It also removes somewhat the repetion assocated with psedo-random text.

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Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project
Chaos Factor Design Document

True, and interesting. However, this has a risk of becoming ambiguous (sp?). Or worse, the player may not have an idea what happened at all! The example you gave was a pretty straight forward one, but it doesn''t seem very hard to come up with image-series that can be difficult to understand, and if you do it''s possible you understood them wrongly! Another thing is that the player might get bored having to spend a lot of time figuring out what the NPC is actually saying (when it would have been clear if it had been in text).

It''s definitely a cool idea though, and for a game in which this is the main problem the player is up against, it could be fun. For instance, a detective game where you first have to talk to a lot of people (or maybe just one), get some images, try to figure out what they mean and guess who the killer was (or the soldiers in this case).


About the repetition... how many different ways are there to show a few images to convey the message "Bring this item to my friend Bob"? This brings along another interesting question, how will you show that it''s Bob and not Johnny-Boy Senior you should bring the package to? A simple identification text under each image?

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"Kaka e gott" - Me
Current project: An RPG with tactical, real-time combat with a realistic damage system, and randomly generated world and dialogue.

Well ideally, the image language would be inuitive enough that so it could be learned fairly quickly and used easily. If done correctly the player wouldn''t have to try and figure out what the message is, since it would be clear direct and un ambigous.

Since its all done by un ambigous images there would really only one way to say "Bring the package to bob" There would of coures be no text since its all done by symbols. That would include people so everyone would have a name sign. Just like the artist formely know as prince....okay bad example but you get the idea.

It also removes some what the problem with characters saying things in a way diffrent then the player wants... Since the player can make up the words themselves to go along with the images.

afte all "HELP" "ME" "OBI-WAN" can be intereperted "help me obi-wan you are my only hope" or "Hey obi-wan dude I need some help, get your ass over here." Its all up to the player..

-----------------------------------------------------
Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project
Chaos Factor Design Document