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.
------------------
"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]