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From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: Goal oriented NPCs
Message-ID: <GFp8HB.GDu@world.std.com>
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 16:00:46 GMT
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Kevin Ausman <kdausman@yahoo.com> wrote:
>For example, I could imagine RAP working well for a criminal
>investigation style game, where the perpetrator has particular rules
>about committing crimes (e.g. only when there aren't witnesses),
>hiding evidence, avoiding capture, etc. With this kind of scheme, the
>perp could do all of these things in a non-hard-coded, rudimentally
>responsive way as the player character tries to figure out what is
>going on and catch him.

Since you didn't seem to get any real responses on the "does it
not work in real game situations" question, I'll offer you a
reasonably well-considered guess: "no, it does not". Now, I've
never actually used it (or its Inform equvialent), but I've thought
a lot about using that sort of thing, and I've worked on commercial
action/adventurers that used *incredibly simple* goal-driven AIs,
but incredibly minimal planning.

Here are the obvious sorts of problems with using something like
RAP. They are likely outcomes, not things that are doomed to be
true, though.

You'll end up with a toy, not a game. There's no
guarantee of fun--you don't want AIs that are smart, you want
AIs that are fun to interact with. Without a pretty huge effort
into a "gamemaster AI", all of these clever NPC actions may be
invisible to the player, and result in a scenario that the player
can't win due to lack of information--information that you would
normally carefully hand-construct into the system. Without a
very clever "storywriter AI", the story will be weaker than that
of hand-designed IF.

None of those things are fatal--you may well be able to make
a fun toy, and some people are more interested in immersively
exploring a believable world than experiencing the best possible
story.

But I think the medium of text is going to be biased to story; you're
far more likely to see this stuff done in 3d first-person games
(although even that seems unlikely due to the "toy vs. game",
the "fun", and the "lack of information" problems). In point
of fact, this is one of the things I've considered trying
to pursue--but only in the 3d first-person arena, not in my IF.

SeanB
