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[Skynet]

[INDEPTH:VERY]
[DIFFICULT:MASSIVELY]

Is my prediction. But it would be pretty fun and flavoursome.

"My most favorite game is [GAME_NAME]. [GAME_NAME] is based on our country's strong love for [RANDOM_TRAIT], and [SUPER_SECRET_CONSPIRACY_CLUE] and is totally not Calvinball in disguise. You [ACTION] [MINTATURIZED VERSION OF RANDOMLY GENERATED ANIMALS WITHIN THE BIOME] to get [POINT_NAMES] and you win when you reach [ARBITRARY GOAL]. There [IS/IS NOT] a time limit involved. Want to play?"

"You are in the last inning of [GAME_NAME], and your opponent is about to do [RANDOM ACTION] (which has a 100% chance of moving the game towards your opponent). You are 60% proficient in [GAME_NAME], so your margin of error is +/- 20%. You have two choices, [ACTION_A] (which is very risky but could win the game) and [ACTION_B] (which is much safer). Choose now!"

>[ACTION_A] - 70% of losing immediately, 30% chance of winning immediately
>[ACTION_B] - 50% of game continuing in a stalemate, 30% of game moving towards you, 20% chance of game moving towards your opponent
---
On topic, I warn against scope creep, so try to limit as many features as you can...and take as many shortcuts as necessary when implementing the features you do want. For example, if I want procedurally generated games, I would unironically use the approach I outlined above, even if it might not be as fun interacting with menus to "play" a mini-game, just because it'd be easier to pull off. Maybe I can afford to make a more complex procedural-game-generator if the games were made very rare, so people might be more invested in trying them out. Of course, more focus on making mini-games means less focus on the main game...so...it's a difficult balancing act.

I do like the idea of "conversation paths" for handling convos between the PC and the NPC and think they'd be easier to implement and somewhat cool. Retropunch pointed out that they have been used before (rarely), which is a good enough reason to use it again and improve on it. Plus this means you can reuse your sentence generation code for your character's responses as well (with your very own personality tics). NPC chooses a random question, the sentence generator spits out a sensible reply based on the character's background.

[NJW2000]

I'd say that that would be the better option. If you do add games, don't forget about gambling!

I reckon that a coupla variants on chess or go  (board size, pieces/starting stones, scoring system/win conditions) would be easy enough to program for URR, comparatively, but AI would be a nightmare. And as for actually fully proc-genned games...

[Retropunch]

Scope creep is certainly the great evil of game development, and certainly not something I'd want to encourage. My thought would be that adding a few really simple games would allow players to have a bit of diversion from the endless exploring, and also a sort of internal aim before the actual meat of the game gets implemented.

Whilst I know Mark is in absolutely no rush to onboard players and the like, it seems as though it'll e quite some time before actual 'game' bits get added in whilst the world continues to be built. That's fine, but having a few side games (and being able to travel to different lands to play these games) could make for a very nice early 'aim' for players.

It can also easily be built on as more systems get put in place. Once a monetary system is implemented, the player could bet on games. Once shopkeepers are added in the player might be able to buy the required game boards to play, etc. etc.

I'd keep the number of games very low, maybe 2-3 per world and have them relatively simple. There's tons of python tutorials on how to make battleships, chess, go and checkers which you could just rename or alter slightly. You could even just settle on chess, and randomly pick a few variants at start (see chess variants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess_variants).

[ChairmanPoo]

Ancient games like this would certainly add personality.

somewhat OT, but I love the tale about the small clay pot in the mummy. I can imagine the conversation.

[NJW2000]

Thing is, you couldn't actually play them singleplayer unless Mark wrote AIs or something like that.

And I know very little about programming, but I know that AI is really bloody difficult, especially with chess/go.

Draughts might be an option: draughts has been solved and stuff, it's a bit simpler.

[Retropunch]

Thing is, you couldn't actually play them singleplayer unless Mark wrote AIs or something like that.

And I know very little about programming, but I know that AI is really bloody difficult, especially with chess/go.

Draughts might be an option: draughts has been solved and stuff, it's a bit simpler.

Chess AI has been created millions of times over, and there are many tutorials on it, and a lot of opensource bits/fullimps to draw on (fully functional open source python console chess on the first page of google: https://www.daniweb.com/programming/software-develop0ment/threads/416196/chess-in-python)

Yes, it's not going to be grandmaster level, but it'd be good enough for the casual player.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Ah, such an interesting idea! I can't deny - I am tempted. Certainly not exactly a priority, though!

-----

Words!

Two way - yes, I totally agree! Like I say, it'll be rare-ish that they ask you questions back, but if they get suspicious, the volume of questions will rise. Buttering people up - yessss, but not in 0.8. I just want to get this thing out in September, and that means focusing on the essentials of 0.8 and nothing else, but yeah, I definitely need some kind of mood-tracker for what people think about you and therefore what they say.

-----

All the remaining default conversation options, and all the remaining expansions, are now complete. I’ve also altered the expansion code such that certain expansions aren’t tied to certain words or sentences within a language and guaranteed to appear whenever that sentence or word is said, but instead they appear with a % chance for every instance of a particularly word or phrase someone in that dialect says, depending on their sentence complexity (as we discussed before, sentence complexity is now tied to individuals, not to entire cultures). Here’s a couple of examples, courtesy of our good playtesting friend, Orangejaw Moonblizzard, and some NPCs who may or may not have had their origins changed using admin commands for the sake of testing (as you’ll notice these replies could not be for the same nation!)…





Negative Replies

The big thing this week and weekend has been working on negative replies – so, for instance, if you ask “Are we near the desert?”, the default response is “We are near [desert] in [direction]”, or whatever, but obviously a valid option is “We are not near the desert” – and this obviously applies to loads of questions. What if the speaker’s nation has no army, or dislikes art, or have never travelled, or doesn’t know any other civilizations, or lives on a tiny island and knows nothing of the wider world, or doesn’t worship a religion, and so on? We therefore now have a body of negative replies for people to basically say “no”, “that’s irrelevant”, “I don’t know”, or “I don’t care”, in hundreds of thousands of interesting ways!

These negative replies effectively now split up into two categories, which we could usefully call “general” and “specific” negative replies. “General” negative replies include replies like “I don’t know”, “I don’t remember”, “I’d rather not answer”, “I’m not authorized to give you that information”, etc, which can apply to a huge range of NPCs in a huge range of situations. Since the player will run into these fairly often, I’ve made sure that there’s a lot of variation in these general negative responses – although in many cases, of course, there’s only so many ways that you can actually utter some of these things, but here are a few examples.



“Specific” negative replies refer to asking a question where the answer is still answering the question, rather than a general answer, but still a negative. For instance, if you ask someone what they think a particular policy in their nation should be, they might reply “I have no interest in politics”, or if you ask someone whether they know any distant cities you might want to visit, they might say “I know of no distant cities” – and so on and so forth. Each of these is often more specific and more varied than the above, so I’m trying to bias people towards using these wherever possible, although they are naturally dependent upon particular cultural/political/religious situations.



Crowd Disinterest

You’ll all recall the “conversation interest” idea that URR conversations will have implemented – that unless you ask relevant questions, NPCs will quickly lose interest in talking to you. This is to stop the player just going through every single question one after the other, and to encourage you towards asking sensible, logical and appropriate questions. However, I realized the other day that I can’t just limit this to a specific NPC getting bored; if you have a bunch of general questions you’re asking every soldier, for instance, then you could just go from one soldier over to the next soldier in the barracks and start questioning them, ignoring the questions you already asked Soldier 1, but assuming (quite fairly) that they will probably respond the same way, seeing as both Soldier 1 and Soldier 2 are just default soldiers.

Therefore, I need to implement some kind of “crowd disinterest” solution, and I think I’m going to do this on two levels. On the “local level”, NPCs within a building will see who you’re talking to and what you’re asking them about, and also within a map grid (within your line of sight, or nearby), and will take note of the questions. So if you question Soldier 1 about pointless stuff, and they tell you to go away, then you start asking Soldier 2 pointless stuff, the time it’ll take Soldier 2 to lose interest will be shorter than normal; Soldier 3’s will then be even shorter; and so forth. Then, at the global level, I think we need a system whereby information about the player slowly spreads through cultures/cities/religions/etc in the entire world so that people get some idea of whether they should respond to the player or not. Neither of these systems will be in 0.8, but they definitely need to be there.

Next Week

Remember those two new conversation features I mentioned a while back – replies and counter-questions – and also all those questions that have more complex replies, such as lists? Some combination of those will be coming next week – probably the complex replies, I would think. See you then!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Two exciting realisations about in-game conversations this past fortnight! In the process of continuing with sentence generation it became rapidly apparent that in order to actually ensure conversational flow, and to boost the range of experiences that the player can actually have in talking to the game’s NPCs, several new additions would have to be made. As readers will remember, until now there have been basically three kinds of question – the kinds of question that anyone can be asked from the start of the game (such as “What do you do?” or “What are your religious beliefs?”), the kind of question that only specific people can be asked from the start of the game (such as “What are you guarding?” which would apply only to guards, but can always be asked), and the kind of question that can only be asked after a particular trigger is met (such as “What do you think of the novels of [author]?”, which requires you to have come across the author). There is another “category” of question, as well as a new kind of reply that both the player and the NPC will be able to produce within a conversation. These do not especially increase the required volume of sentence generation implementation, as the creation of an overall framework for sentences (in progress) will be equally applicable to all possible sentences, but they will substantially enhance the variation of in-game conversations, and also their realism and believability. Read on!

Counter-Questions

Counter-questions are, as you might expect, questions that the person you’re talking to winds up asking you, which then lead to a variety of possible replies. So, for instance, they might ask you about YOUR religion, in which case you can be truthful or lie and so forth, and the same will then apply for a range of scenarios. Questions of this sort will be particularly relevant when trying to get past guards, for instance, or when trying to enter particularly restrictive or xenophobic or militaristic nations, and the like. I think this will add a very strong extra layer into the conversation system and the ability for the player to “bluff” their way through certain areas, whilst also (like the above points) boosting the realism of the system by changing it away from a rather simpler question-and-answer system. Here’s an example of what counter-questions might look like based on some of the conversations from last week:



Replies

A “reply” in URR is something that can only be said in response to another person’s statement. When a reply is possible, the “Replies” dropdown list will appear, highlighted, right to the special options and to the left of the dialects. Clicking this option will then offer this special sentence/response; if you select another option that isn’t in the replies list, the replies will remain and can be returned to later in the conversation, so this isn’t just a one-off chance. This means that as particularly long conversations continue, the number of possible replies will grow, but it will never grow above half a dozen or so at the most, I would think, and some of the replies will actually be the same as other default questions that simply take on newfound relevance after a previous question. Here’s the same conversation with some answers and two different models: which do you prefer? In the first version the reply and the next question are apart, and the other person might make another comment, whereas in the second version, the reply and the next question are combined…





If you don’t select the reply when prompted, various things will happen. If they ask you a question and you just go onto asking them another question, they’ll likely be offended. Alternatively, some replies will be akin to “follow-on” questions, so they mention something, and you can then pursue that with them as a result of that conversation. These options will stay in your reply options for that character forever, and can be addressed (or not) whenever.

I’m going to implement this because as I experimented, it became clear that conversational flow in real life is obviously far more of a back-and-forth than a question-and-answer, and the system needed to reflect this. The reply will allow the player to get more depth about a specific question asked instead of moving onto another question, and should be especially relevant if the NPC being talked to winds up revealing something the player wasn’t previously aware of, and wants more information on.

In the process, though, I found myself wondering about the exact flow of the overall. Right now the system is that you select a topic, you select a question, then the questions window closes and you see it spoken and a reply given. This is largely from the inevitable constraints on the size of the screen, fitting in questions as well as images and topic lists, and so forth. I became briefly concerned that this might actually break up the flow of conversation, especially if you want to ask two questions from the same topic list one after the other. To help cancel this out, if you return immediately to a conversation topic you’ll be at the same part of it you previously scrolled into, and I also added in a system that will keep any letters typed in for the search function whilst you’re still in one topic. So let’s say you ask about Artwork X from Nation Y, and you found the question by typing in Nation X’s name into the “Art” menu, and that question is asked, and then you want to ask about another artwork from Nation X, going immediately back into the art list will keep the letters there, but changing to another menu will reset the letter tracker. I think this is quite a good compromise. Equally, of course, we should remember that the conversation system in URR is specifically designed to be a little slower and more thoughtful than the systems one gets in more RPGs where the player is encouraged to just exhaust conversation options. I think the current system (with these recent changes) will now work very smoothly, actually, and I’m happy with the balance between ease-of-access and possibly encouraging the player to think about other relevant options as a conversation progresses.

Next few weeks:

In the coming weeks I’ll be trying (see below) to continue the implementation of counter-questions and work on the implementation of replies, as well as adding all the “Hmm…” stuff and punctuation options into conversations properly, rather than having them only present as a placeholder to test how things look. The other big thing to handle now is that all the [religion] or [date] or [place] modifiers work; a few have been implemented, but again, just quickly and crudely to get a feel for the system. Another task for the coming weeks is to go to all of these, make sure they work, and to make sure NPCs already spawn with the requisite information for personal details – “I was born in [place] in [year]” – as well as civilisation details – “I am from [nation] and we worship [religion]”, and so on. There’s a pretty big selection of these,so it’ll take a bit.

Why no blog post last week?

Last week was the first time in several years I missed a blog update – this, unfortunately, is simply because I am basically working twelve hours, every day including weekends right now, and I’m totally swamped with my work at the moment. Believe me, folks, I am *incredibly* desperate to get 0.8 finally finished and out, but there’s just so much on my plate at the moment with strict fixed deadlines which has to be prioritised, and it’s hard to carve out any time (even at weekends) to do much coding. Just rest assured I am working as hard as I possibly can to get 0.8 released, and I’m really sorry it’s taking so long and I feel tremendously guilty about dragging it out, but things are really tough right now (due also to other life issues beyond what I’ve described here) and I’m deeply stressed out, but doing my best. There’s only so many hours in the day and I just cannot prioritise coding at this month/two-month moment in my life, but I’m trying to grab an hour here and there to just inch forward on conversation implementation. In the coming month, therefore, some of most of the blog entries are going to be other entries on general games topics of discussion/interest I’ve had written for a while and I think you folks will be interested in, and I’ll upload those instead if (as is likely) there isn’t really any URR update to put out. I hope you’ll enjoy these entries; people have always enjoyed these before, so I hope these will keep you all occupied until I’m out of this rough patch. I’m really sorry, I hope you all understand, and I promise 0.8 will be worth it.

[NJW2000]

Is there an option to leave a pregnant pause in the conversation, i.e. you question someone a lot, they ask you one question, then you answer but don't ask anything else? As if you were trying to get them to ask you stuff or talk about something generally?



Also, if NPCs can ask questions, what about answering questions just with another question.

e.g.

"Where do you live?"
"Who's asking?"

Or: "Where are those soldiers going?"
"Why do you want to know?"

etc.

[Scoops Novel]

Chill man. If toady can get away with 2 year releases you can sure as hell miss a blog post .

Agreed, NJW. Lots of conversations are back and forth statements with implied questions.

[Retropunch]

This all looks great! I agree with NJW - I think a lot of this comes down to how you can influence the NPCs with replies and questions. As you may remember back to our conversational analysis courses, a question is a always a loaded interjection - there's never a 'neutral' question and I think that's important.

I also feel that, similarly to the second type of question (that only specific people can be asked from the start of the game), I feel that NPCs should only really ask you questions about stuff they're interested in. Similarly, they should ask more questions when they like you more and less when they like you less. All common sense stuff, but something I've never seen in a game before!

BTW I much prefer the first layout for replies (with the break between answer and the next question). Whilst the first one looks more 'natural' it's a bit harder to read and with so much conversation available, it'll be important.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Is there an option to leave a pregnant pause in the conversation, i.e. you question someone a lot, they ask you one question, then you answer but don't ask anything else? As if you were trying to get them to ask you stuff or talk about something generally?

Also, if NPCs can ask questions, what about answering questions just with another question.

e.g.

"Where do you live?"
"Who's asking?"

Or: "Where are those soldiers going?"
"Why do you want to know?"

etc.

Interesting. I hadn't considered this option at all, but it's an intriguing one. I'll give it some thought. Answering question with question - yes, definitely! I've actually put in one or two of those already, but there's a small chance they might not make it into 0.8.

Chill man. If toady can get away with 2 year releases you can sure as hell miss a blog post .

Agreed, NJW. Lots of conversations are back and forth statements with implied questions.

Thanks my friend . I do appreciate it. It'll be so useful to be able to take a month back and just get through all this work garbage before I make a victorious return to finish 0.8 off.

This all looks great! I agree with NJW - I think a lot of this comes down to how you can influence the NPCs with replies and questions. As you may remember back to our conversational analysis courses, a question is a always a loaded interjection - there's never a 'neutral' question and I think that's important.

I also feel that, similarly to the second type of question (that only specific people can be asked from the start of the game), I feel that NPCs should only really ask you questions about stuff they're interested in. Similarly, they should ask more questions when they like you more and less when they like you less. All common sense stuff, but something I've never seen in a game before!

BTW I much prefer the first layout for replies (with the break between answer and the next question). Whilst the first one looks more 'natural' it's a bit harder to read and with so much conversation available, it'll be important.

Only asking questions about stuff they care about; agreed, that makes a lot of sense actually - obvious now you say it, but I hadn't considered it. It'll also make conversaitons more meaningful, as it'll always boost conversations in topics that NPCs will know a lot about, i.e. a priest will ask you the most religious questions back, and combined with them already having the most to say on that topic, should play out really nicely. Re: the first/second option, people are saying both, but the "gap" option is winning, and I *think* I prefer it too...

[NJW2000]

Oh, and a less relevant question: Italo Calvino, yea or nay?

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Oh, and a less relevant question: Italo Calvino, yea or nay?

80% YEA!

[Retropunch]

Only asking questions about stuff they care about; agreed, that makes a lot of sense actually - obvious now you say it, but I hadn't considered it. It'll also make conversaitons more meaningful, as it'll always boost conversations in topics that NPCs will know a lot about, i.e. a priest will ask you the most religious questions back, and combined with them already having the most to say on that topic, should play out really nicely. Re: the first/second option, people are saying both, but the "gap" option is winning, and I *think* I prefer it too...

Yeah, I think it'd flow a lot better and cut out meaningless questions when you're wanting to push through.

Attached to this, I don't know how much you've thought about NPC 'traits' and I believe this would be the best way to do this. For instance, priests would all have the 'religious' trait, and that would make them ask more religious based questions. However, you might also have 'alcoholic' who would talk about drinks/brewing a lot, 'well dressed' who might talk about clothes, and you might have things like 'art lover' who would talk about art, even if they're not a gallery curator and so on.

I believe this would make NPCs seem a lot more like individuals - you could quickly end up with things being a bit 'cookie cutter' if only priests talk about religion and only guards talk about fighting etc.

It'd also allow you to expand further in that direction if you so wished. It'd only be a small step between that and adding in some extra colour to the NPC descriptions ('his coat specked is with paint', 'she smells strongly of alcohol' etc.)