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Author Topic: Story telling utility/script/plugin?  (Read 2283 times)

Urist Da Vinci

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Story telling utility/script/plugin?
« on: June 08, 2014, 01:35:38 pm »

It occurred to me that many people, for either fortress mode or adventurer mode, would find useful something that does the following:

- For the adventurer (1st person) or selected unit (3rd person) output information about their current situation.
- Information is limited by what the unit knows or could be expected to know.
- Information is altered by the unit's perspective.
- Avoids being redundant to the unit's description, inventory list, or health stats except where significantly important.
- Avoids giving spoilers?
- Avoids giving adventurers thoughts, opinions, or feelings that could conflict with a player's own narrative.

i.e. for an adventurer, you would be told if you see people/creatures (and their rough direction/elevation), if you see any companions, enemies, quest targets. Perhaps it would also describe items that you can see lying on the ground. There might be need for adjustable levels of detail here.

For fortress mode, it could use job, personality, and recent thoughts info to add flavour. Perhaps they are grumbling about having to haul heavy items. Perhaps they can see friends or family nearby. "Dishmab staggers past the forge as he slowly hauls a platinum nugget to a stone stockpile. He is looking forward to finishing this task so that he can get a drink."

I considered a repeating script that would follow one dwarf in fortress mode and write a story about them, but don't know if that would be of value. Probably lots of "Dumat is sleeping" and "Dumat is still sleeping".

Has anyone else done or considerer anything like this? What else should be described?

Warmist

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Re: Story telling utility/script/plugin?
« Reply #1 on: June 08, 2014, 02:05:36 pm »

Has anyone else done or considerer anything like this? What else should be described?
i did think few ideas in fort mode mostly:
  • a building that units would approach and post their ideas/thoughts/propaganda/etc... - failed somewhat, needs a LOT of work to massage all the cases
  • a system that would allow writing parts of story and then player would bind that into a book (recently became possible), currently only dumps all history of one hist. figure into a book

Meph

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Re: Story telling utility/script/plugin?
« Reply #2 on: June 08, 2014, 03:13:31 pm »

If the dwarf himself would write it in his diary, that would make the most sense.
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kr0pper

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Re: Story telling utility/script/plugin?
« Reply #3 on: September 16, 2014, 12:59:23 pm »

I wrote a little script which monitors selected dwarf and put any changes of him into log file.
Examples like ''Now I'am a superior mason, I like stones" or "This boulder is too heavy, I hate boulders all my life"

It's will be good to see some ideas to monitoring, maybe:
- diary about recent events: food, drinks, buildings, items... ("Roast was little rotten, but... Ahh, om-nom-nom, vermins are delicious!")
- look around for preferred items, buildings, friends ("That damn Urist sleeps, why I can't relax too?")
- attributes, skills and labors ("Why, Armok? I don't want to hunt, I want a party!")
- any other random events ("Dear diary, life is miserable. I want to kill these goblins, but all I must to do is refuse their ugly bodies. Life is stink.")

I think is the best to use external dictionaries for random phrases about all above.  ???
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Nopenope

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Re: Story telling utility/script/plugin?
« Reply #4 on: December 02, 2014, 06:57:31 pm »

Would you care to share this script so we can see how procedurally generated storytelling looks like?
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rmblr

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Re: Story telling utility/script/plugin?
« Reply #5 on: December 03, 2014, 05:51:55 am »

Something like this would be great, combined with a relationship viewer among your fort's dwarves, and portraits, etc. Something external to enable the player to connect more with the dwarfs and get a sense of the social situation in the fort.
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