I need help making a conversation generator! I am making a game as close to AD&D as possible!!! But it will be part text and very little graphics. But I need to be able to have my players ask a question and it will generate an answer. I kinda don''t want the same answer all the time like final fantasy when you talk to someone twice! If you can help please reply!!!!!!

Hi

Start with a simple parser (i.e. it takes apart a sentence to try to make sense of it). Define valid input for your parser hi, bye, name, to ... then you can start to build on different responses to the parsers understanding. The list of responses could be held in anyway you want, but thats not the important part of your question.

So start with something like
input - hi
possible output - hi, how are you?, whats your name etc...

I hope you know where I am coming from, if not post again and I will read it when I am a bit more awake.

Bottom line is, responses will be limited - but the understanding logic of the parser can make the best use of the possibile replys.

My 2 cents, pennies, kroners (very international eh?)

Ewan

I''ve seen these type of parsers in action and yes thier neat but it gets wierd when the people learn the key words that acivated certain phrases. For example:
Joe walks up to bob the bread salesman and bread is a keyword.
Joe says "Can I please have a loaf of bread shoved up my butt?"
and bob says, "sure bread costs 3 gold."

If you want well articulated conversations you have to parse the sentence structure on a level of verbs, adverbs, the tense of words, etc. This would be quite complex but unless you address these issues your conversation engine will have some of these problems.

Well...if you want to see a such thing in action...

http://www.cs.flinders.edu.au/research/AI/LoebnerPrize/

I don''t think it''s usefull for us, game programmers. The delay between questions and answers seem to be quite high. Still interesting to see.

Y.