Quote:Original post by Nofootbird
Agree with Morri.
Maybe it is theoretically feasible to make a game full of action-results, yet developers have to add immense contents into a single game. As the growth of branches, the game content have to exponentially expand in order to complete the story. The storyline will like a binary tree, which is too hard to control and it will cost unimaginably plenty of time to accomplish the story.
I think it is possible. Back in the 80's you had PacMan. The player made choices and the game reacted. If you turned left at an intesection the game would react one way and if you turned right (or forwards, or backwards) it would react another way.
Now, the desigener didn't code in each reaction to every dsecision the player could make, that would have been impossible for the technology back then (even today it would be difficult). What they did was to create rules as to how the ghosts would react, not to a specific decision, but in general (iirc: One would head towards the next intersection the player would be at, one would head to where the player was last at, etc).
These simple rules created a situation where a great depth of gameplay emerged.
Now, if we could create a simple (although necesarily more complex than PacMan) set of rules that agents could impliment to drive a stroy then we could create games with dynamic stroies.
The way to visialise this is as a landscape and we need to create a pathfinding algorithm to traverse it. What we do is work out where the player is in this landscape (based on their interactions - as in what sunandshadow is taking about) and then find a path to where the designers what the game to go. Then the game (and NPCs) can take the necesary actions to drive the stroy along that path.
An example is that if the designers want the princess to be kidnaped, but the player never goes to the castle, then they can never find out (let alone feel the need to ) the quest to rescue the princess.
However, if the game can path find, then maybe some other NPC can be kidnaped, or maybe the kidnapers can become some other threat (it would depend on the landscape the designers want), or maybe the event waits and give the player a reason to visit the castle or get involved with the princess (maybe she tried to run away and become an adventureer and one of the player's party members is her).
Because certain things don't need to be resolved until they become important to the player (eg: if an NPC has a secret identity or not), these can be left unresolved in the plot until they become important. Like with pPacMan, it is unimportant about an intersection where noboty is, so the game does not try to compute any decision for that.
It is the same principal, just that we need more data and a more complex landscape than in PacMan.