Quote:Original post by Tom
Wavinator: You know as well as I do from all the previous discussions we've had in this forum over the last four years or so that the only reliable way to emulate human emotion is to script it, and of course this detracts from a game's replayability.

If creating a Complex NPC was easy, then it would be reliable, too.
The more people talk about ways to make NPCs without scripts, the easier it could get to do so.

Wavinator, Im new here, so i dont know about your psychological modelling system. It sounds interesting tho. What is it?

Quote:Original post by Iron Chef Carnage
A lot of this post is kinda rambling, but my last paragraph is fairly concise. Feel free to skip down.

How about having aversion be a gradually increased stamina-type thing. I'm thinking here of the stamina in GTA: San Andreas. You can sprint for a while, and then you get tired and can't do it anymore, but if you keep sprinting and resting, you can go longer and longer.

Applying that here, we'll use the squaddie/toasted corpse example you used. When a totally green FNG is the first guy to discover the flamer, he'll get stressed. So, his "Wig-o-Meter" will spike to 80%, he'll puke, turn and run like hell for the out-of-doors. Given some cool-down time, a few friendly faces and maybe a gruffly reassuring comment from the Sargeant, he'll be down to 20%, and once again a functional member of the team, although he won't really want to go back in there.

If he goes back in the toasty will gradually build his stress back up. At 50% he'll complain, at 60% he'll fidget, at 70% he'll start ignoring orders and go sit out in the hall, and if he gets to 80% he's out of there. At 90% he totally loses his mind and starts behaving erratically or becomes catatonic, and at 100% his heart stops.

But if he goes in and sees the corpse again, his knowledge that it's there will reduce the surprise and the spike will not be as bad. It might take a few seconds for him to get up to that 50% level. Then you let him sit out, and when he comes back he'll never get above 70% from that particular corpse. More time spent, say securing the area, and he'll be making jokes and offering "Private Crispin" a cigarette ("Got a light? Haw, haw, haw!")

But when that squaddie encounters his first dead kid, or sees a team mate go down, he'll benefit little from his experience.

I think remedies should be effective at certain levels. At 50% or lower, a simple "Stay frosty, soldier," would be enough to counterract a little carnage or a spooky noise, but if he's at 60% already, the benefit will be reduced. Sitting on the other side of a wall is good up to about 70%, and smoking a cigarette is even better, but at 85%, he needs to get the heck out of the building, or be surrounded by at least six friendly, calm people.

Basically, I propose an economy of mitigators and exascerbators, regulated by the intestinal fortitude of the individual. Further sophistication could include types of stress (death, tragedy, pain, fear etc.) and specialized resistances to them. The alien-bashing hero might flip out when his partner dies, or be unable to stand the sight of a dead woman.

Strangely, this really makes me think of an attack / damage system with the stimuli being different types of assault (erm, for whatever that's worth). You get a strategy that evolves from knowing the personality of NPCs and which "zones" they can withstand and for how long. It emphasizes positioning (inside / outside rooms or line of site), pairing with other NPCs and object use (give him a cigarette to calm him down, for example).

Not surprisingly, I like it for those possibilities. Expanding a bit on your idea, I can imagine one way of doing this would be to have nodes that radiate fear, which are either imbedded in locations, monsters or objects like corpses. To emulate the various stimuli, the nodes have unique codes by type (corpse, dead child, dead buddy, etc.) The fear node tries to add fear to the NPC, but the NPC first checks his defense against that type of stimuli, reducing the fear by a certain amount. Whatever gets added ultimately updates a total amount of fear the NPC has.

Positive stimuli (big guns, allies, training, an escape hatch). How fast the NPC sheds fear naturally would be a measure of his/her/its fortitude.

Quote:Original post by Tom
Wavinator: You know as well as I do from all the previous discussions we've had in this forum over the last four years or so that the only reliable way to emulate human emotion is to script it, and of course this detracts from a game's replayability.

It's a nasty challenge, agreed. Not only do you have the problem of repetition, you have to create some sort of interface for the player to manage what's happening under the hood.

What's a bit heartening is the fact that you don't have to get it perfect. It just has to be playable enough so that when you see a guy do something you know why it happened. Theory-wise, you have to know enough intrinsicly about the game system to be able to respond to it and strategize, but not so much that you think more about the strategy than about being immersed in the drama.


A question about anxiety versus fear: Is the distinction all that useful? If you see a monster, you know what you're afraid of. If you then fight it off it runs away to lurk somewhere in the building, do you still feel fear or do you now feel anxiety?

Quote:Original post by Iron Chef Carnage

Wavinator, how's your psychological modelling system coming? Could this sort of thing be worked into it?

Thanks for asking ICC. The more I work on this stuff the more I see the wisdom of your advice to simplify, given some time ago. [wink] I've been doing more biz development and networking than design (trying to get money for this #*$@! thing!), so dev progress has been VERY slow. But I posted hoping for exactly the kind of insight I've gotten so far.

I don't remember if I talked about it or not, but one major change has been in shifting the perspective so that you're more preoccupied by your own character than by your crew, in general. This has shifted your play focus away from directly manipulating them to giving more abstract orders and delegating. Hopefully, this will ultimately streamline the learning curve.

Quote:Original post by Garmichael
Wavinator, Im new here, so i dont know about your psychological modelling system. It sounds interesting tho. What is it?

Hey, thanks for the interest, Garmichael. Toward the end of last year I began posting a bunch of stuff about modeling loyalty, morale and personality types for a sci-fi RPG (think Star Trek meets The Sims). The basic system deals with things (equipment, facilites, allies) that radiate effects or attract NPCs, as well as (still major work to be done here) events like death or losing a fight that directly impact the NPC's behavior. The aim is to create a strategy for managing the crew aboard your ship or base, with NPCs having a personality that confers bonuses and has drawbacks, all of which affect what you're trying to do.

Quote:Original post by Wavinator
A question about anxiety versus fear: Is the distinction all that useful? If you see a monster, you know what you're afraid of. If you then fight it off it runs away to lurk somewhere in the building, do you still feel fear or do you now feel anxiety?

Well, the general idea is that if you can see it in your mind, it's probably fear. The distinction between fear and anxiety is not as vague as you'd think, but it's extremely difficult to put into words. It's one of those situations where you just know it, but you can't really describe it. I have a theory that all fear and anxiety ultimately boils down to an unconscious fear of mortality, and I've written an essay that's supports this (not for a degree, just a personal thing), but my thoughts are not entirely clear on the matter.

Regarding my comments on scripted behavior. . . I'd like to take back what I said, after reading something interesting. I should have thought of this before because I've played the Sims 1 & 2, games that attempt to emulate human behavior in a distilled, soap opera setting using a rules-based (non-scripted) system. Actually, you can read this article at Gamespot about the spiritual successor to System Shock 2 --- one of my all-time favorite games, by the way --- and how Irrational is attempting to emulate life using rules-based behavior.

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/bioshock/preview_6110044.html

Human behavior is difficult to emulate because humans respond to a wide variety of stimuli, including other humans, none of whom are even remotely predictable. This creates an extraordinarily complex web of responses that psychologists have been trying to justify for centuries. (I don't think a game developer is going to do it in two years, so we have to wing it.) I believe emergent behavior, which is the trademark of rules-based systems, may be the link toward making convincing NPC's. Sounds like your own design uses some of this.

Anyway, I just wanted to throw that out.