I''m trying to make the AI in my game act more like humans, so I''m designing a system in which the AI has to gather information on how it makes decisions in the virtual world. For example: A bounty hunter is walking down the market sector of a futuristic city trying to find out about a certain person. I''d like him to actually talk to other people to find out information on the subject. How can I do this?

well there are a lot of ways you could do this...
for the following example i am assuming the bounty hunter is looking for the player.
one idea would be for all people on the streets to store when they''ve last seen the player, which direction the player was heading, and how long ago in game time. Then when the bounty hunter sees a person, he walks up to them and then checks the variables. He then heads in that direction. If he comes to another person, he checks their information. If the person saw the player more recently than the previous person, he follows the most recent direction. There are probably some bugs in this, but you get the idea.
You could add a feature where if the player sneaks around and wears dark clothing the people on the streets may not notice him, and if the player runs around in a clown suit everyone will notice him...
The bounty hunter could also follow footprints, etc.

I like the previous poster''s idea. I think you could also make it more "human-like" by having some of the humans that the bounty hunter talks to "forget" some details about what they saw, or maybe give him information that leads him astray. For example, if the bounty hunter is looking for an oriental man wearing dark clothing, then perhaps one of the people that the bounty hunter interviews will have seen such a man, but it may not be the man he is looking for.

For added excitment, you could add hot chicks running around topless to distract the bounty hunter. If he was distracted, then he would be more human

Russell

maybe each person on the street notices more things about the player depending on how long they see him for... they could notice (for example):

height (small, medium, tall), then
size (thin, medium, fat), then
race, then
gender, then
hair colour, then
clothes, then
distinctive features
etc.

so if you walk in front of somebody, they might only remember that you were an asian female, of short height, with a pink t-shirt and black pants, whereas if you dashed across they might only remember you were short + asian. of course there would be other short height asian females walking on the streets (randomly generated?). the more details the person saw, the more sure the bounty hunter is...
taking russell's idea, over time the person gradually forgets each quality (so they forget the clothes, then the gender, then the race, etc. etc)

you could also have a "suspicious person" rating. if you walk by with a blood-stained shirt and a sawn off shotgun, that will definetly be remembered by the person... whereas if you clean your shirt and hide that shotgun under your trenchcoat you will blend in much better...

you could make it quite complex.

replying to this topic is giving me ideas... it would be cool to have some semi-realistic identification AI... it always bothered me how in GTA3 (For example) you could kill a cop, speed over to the other side of the city without being followed, and still the next cop who saw you would instantly know it was you who killed his friend...
imagine being able to run away, throw your bloodstained clothes in a bin and change into fresh ones, dye your hair and put on a fake moustache, and then being able to walk past a cop without him recognising you at all...

it would also be funny to allow the bounty hunter to talk to the player... if he was looking for you, but you changed your appearance... he could come up to you and ask you if you have seen (insert whatever you used to look like here), and you could send him on a wild goose chase by telling him a random direction...

[edited by - sut on June 9, 2002 6:22:49 AM]

Check back through the archives of this forum... there have been many detailed, excellent discussions about this same topic.

Cheers,

Timkin

I''m new to all of this what are annotated objects and ghosts?

I would recommend a semantic network with threshold based detioration. Try seraching this forum for "NPC gossip".