Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
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From: dmorin@world.std.com (Duane D Morin)
Subject: Re: achievable goals for NPC design
Message-ID: <CMDJBq.J72@world.std.com>
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
References: <grady.763164522@xcf.berkeley.edu>
Date: Wed, 9 Mar 1994 01:40:37 GMT
Lines: 65

In article <grady.763164522@xcf.berkeley.edu>,
Steven Grady <grady@xcf.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>For instance, unless one wants to implement a full-scale natural
>knowledge processor and generator, there are not many options for
>handling dialogue with NPCs.  One is to provide menus of possible
>phrases (which I found extremely annoying).  Another is to do as in a
>game which I read a recent review of, which had a menu of attitudes
>(e.g. speak threateningly, graciously, bluntly), which is a nice
>improvement, but still quite limited.  Or you can use keyword search,
>which is useful, but pretty easily reaches the limit of simulated
>understanding, and as such can also get annoying.  I'm sure there are
>many other approaches one can take.

A brief thread on "Foreign Languages in IF" touched a few of these issues,
after the idea was raised to have NPCs speaking in some manufactured
language, such as "Dwarfish", that could be easily parsed.  [Hey, waitaminute..
I started that thread. :-)]  But, as pointed out, NLP is NLP, and you're
either giving the user a subset of the language or not.  The question then
becomes how useful of a subset you've got - do you create an NPC where
the subset makes sense (like your examples below), or do you just fix it
so that the user doesn't expect to be able to get very complicated.
(The thread rapidly turned into a discussion of the merits of Lucasgames,
and then into a discussion on Undo and other metacommands.)

>Another option is to acknowledge that it's a lot of work to implement
>true NLP (and the state of the art is still pretty bad, I'm led to
>understand), so it's better to avoid it altogether.  Dialogue could be
>eliminated (easy, but limiting and unrealistic), or NPCs could be
>eliminated (not too bad if there are a sufficient number of PCs in a
>networked environment).  But it's strikes me as very elegant to come up
>with an NPC conception in which it make sense that the character can't
>understand or speak.  For instance, an illiterate deaf-mute would not
>be expected to be able to communicate in anything but gestures and
>actions.  Such a character could probably seem reasonable in the right
>environment (e.g. a warrior in a barbaric culture, or a child raised by
>wolves).  

For a character or two, sure, this would be ok, but I think the players would
rapidly get bored with it, and hope to find someone that they could hold
a better conversation with.  One has to ask, though, other than ordering 
an NPC to do something or asking the NPC about a particular subject, just
how much conversation can you have?

>The nice thing about such NPCs is that when a player
>encounters them, they will never be frustrated by the limitations of
>the parser/AI-engine/whatever.  It will just be an appropriate aspect
>of the character.

I've entertained the idea of letting NPC's talk to each other.  I mean,
it would be a sort of weird, virtual turing test - would either NPC be
able to tell that it was speaking to another NPC?  NPC's, by their nature,
would have a limited set of sentence structures with which to form 
sentences.  Therefore, they could also be programmed to parse those
sentences intelligently.  Whammo, create some sort of environment for this
to work in, and you've solved another piece of the "NPC who could solve
the game just as well as a human" - the NPC can run around and converse
with other NPCs.

>	Steven
>Senators, TV Crews, and the nation in general are mystified when,
>on the third day, Flaming Carrot shows a STAR TREK BLOOPER REEL
>on behalf of the defense.

Duane

