 |
Why don’t our NPCs…June 9th, 2006 |
In thinking about the UO resource system in recent posts (1, 2, 3), I also got to thinking about other things that we either wanted to or tried to get the NPCs to do. Today, NPCs have gradually evolved more and more towards being quest dispensers. Originally, we wanted NPCs that would give the illusion of life.
But there were a few bumps on the road, and today NPCs in all the games pretty much suck.
Moving around was actually one of the biggest bumps. One of the most obvious cues that an NPC is actually nothing more than a quest dispenser is to make them immobile terminals with hovering icons over their head. Yet this is what players demand. In early UO the NPCs moved about — there was even some attempt to make them move about purposefully, from trade implement to trade implement, but that failed. When the NPCs would move around while you were trying to talk to them, players objected, and then eventually the NPCs were frozen in place because their primary purpose was as a dispenser of items. I fought this for a long time because I hated the notion of reducing the NPCs back down…
Anyway, here’s some of the big areas that I think are hugely underexploited in NPCs today.
A sense of persistence
However, also in UO, all NPCs were “born” with a name randomly selected from a few baby book lists that we coded into the game. This meant that on different shards, the NPC tending the forge might have a different name. In fact, everything in UO was this way — there were no static, named NPCs or creatures at launch. This cost us the equivalent of “slaying Nagafen,” but it also led to other, different sorts of feelings.
For example, the feeling of coming to the forge one day and seeing that burly Bob the smith, with whom you have dealt for months, was no longer there. Instead, you saw Sarah, who introduced herself as his niece and informed you that Bob was in fact killed by MasTaKillA, an actual other player. I recall implementing a crude form of this, but I don’t remember if we ever deployed it.
Memory in general is underexploited in NPCs today. On LegendMUD, the shopkeeper Aasma will remember regular customers for a period of two weeks, offer them specials, and even let them run a tab. This sort of familiarity, even when you know it is all faked with simple tracking mechanisms, actually adds a lot to the experience. Imagine walking into a tavern and having some NPCs greet you as an old friend rather than as a stranger — a perfect candidate behavior to be on every friendly shopkeeper in the game. Even better if they can timestamp when they last saw you and say “it’s been a long time!”
Which naturally leads into…
Reacting to players
In UO, for a while NPCs would react to you based on your prestige. They’d bow when particularly notable players came by. Of course, first pass they bowed at everyone notable all the time, and as was usual in UO days, this led to the behavior being removed altogether, rather than being finetuned. One can easily imagine that after accomplishing a great deed, a very transitory variable gets placed on you, which causes NPCs to react strongly (bowing, scraping, cheering, etc), but then they forget how special you are in an hour or so. This is much more rewarding than the bland “only the quest dispenser knows what you did” approach that prevails today.
On Legend, there was a bootblack how hung around on the Victorian Isle of Dogs. If you were advanced enough, when you came by, he’d shout to the whole town, “Cor! Didja know Alanna was in town?” Many a PvPer cursed his name and slew him in revenge; many a player also worked to get to the point where they too could be announced.
Having some personality
Providing a distinct sense of personality to different NPCs is challenging. Elaborately constructed ones on Legend were all handcrafted at first, but some of the behaviors were so nifty that they were then inherited by many of the other NPCs in the game. Mrs. O’Leary, innkeeper in Gold Rush San Francisco, would kick you out of her inn if she caught you saying cuss words. Tika, innkeeper in Celtic Ireland, would react to every single social in the game, and if fights or aggressive uses of socials broke out, would call Angus from upstairs to eject the participants from the building. Eventually, some of Tika’s reactions
Trying to make some generic behaviors is a trickier task. In UO, we looked up the randomly generated intelligence level of the NPC, and also a randomly set mood, I think it was. Then we wrote 270 different ways of saying each thing they knew how to say. A stupid surly guy might greet you with “What the hell do YOU want?” whereas a highborn, educated snob might say “Much as it pains me to do so, I greet you.” These stuck, so you’d get to know the snob at your local bakery (at least until someone killed them).
This meant, of course, that there was a lack of specificity to what each NPC would say. 270 entries for “hello” is a lot of work, too. So we broke the speech into libraries, so that the baker would have a library of talk about baking, and a library of generic talk. The baking library didn’t have the amount of variation that the generic stuff did, but the flavor in the generic text was enough to give the NPC some personality.
Other generic things that all NPCs knew how to do included talking about the weather, giving you the time, and even giving directions to nearby landmarks or shops. This latter was accomplished by matching against keywords for what the player was looking for (“where” and “bank” in one sentence would do it), followed by a lookup into a table for the BANK spawn region. The closest one would be found, then the NPC would calculate the distance and direction, and a generic script library provided “You’re looking for the bank? It’s a little ways to the northeast.”
Showing some initiative
One of the big problems that we always ran into with UO and muds was the fact that interaction was keyword-based. This meant that when localization became dominant, it was of course swept away even though it allowed for far more diverse interaction than conversation trees. It also meant, though, that NPCs would butt into conversations between players, thinking they had heard something of import. NPCs taking action on their own is nonetheless something really cool when people get to see it.
In SWG in beta there was a random spawn of a slave girl who would dash out into the street and fixate on a player. She’d rush up and say “Oh please, please, you have to help me! They’re after me! Quick, take this, and don’t let them catch you!” She would then hand you a data disk. Then she would run away, spawn a troop of Stormtroopers who would hunt her down and kill her in one shot. The player was left with a datadisk and intrigue.
Alas, the data disk did nothing, It was a tease. Eventually this, along with all the other “dynamic points of interest,” were removed because of technical difficulties with spawning, primarily. I think this is a huge shame, because the dynamically appearing closed scenario quests allowed incorporation of a ton of extra variables to allow variability, and could appear almost anywhere.
But that’s more of a topic for a quests post. So let’s talk about Indiana Jones instead.
On LegendMUD, Indy was a mob that was only ever spawned as a joke by the admins. I wrote him mostly to get a handle on the scripting system. He’d appear, and announce on the global channels that he was putting together a party for a high-level adventure — I think it was actually to seek the Grail. Then he’d actually run around the mud, cracking jokes, using his whip, and pretending to be gathering up this party. If you met up with him, he had a large library of quotes and reactions drawn from the movies and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.
In UO, beggars, as previously mentioned, would come up and beg from you. When at sea, the tillerman, the faux-NPC built into the ship who served as a method of controlling the vessel, would tell sea stories drawn from a library, in order to pass the time. Will O’the Green in Legend would stop you at the crossroads and demand a toll; pay it, and he’d let you proceed.
In fact, this whole class of what we might call “environmental quests” was a bit of a showcase for NPCs. In Viceroyal Lima, a wagon would periodically get stuck in the mud; get enough players to push at the same time, and they could free it from the mud. If you found Big Jim in the back room of the Salty Dog, you could play a crude version of blackjack with him for money.
Faking you out
In EQ2, there’s a collection of systems that gets called “the ecology system.” It’s actually, I believe, a set of handcrafted scripts that can be applied somewhat generically, primaily in the towns, to allow things like dogs chasing cats, that sort of thing. This isn’t really an ecology, of course — rather, it’s what I call stagecraft, much like billowing cloth and clever lighting replaces fire or water on a stage.
Stuff like dogs chasing cats is of course very very old stagecraft in the virtual worlds biz. Countless muds have had similar; in the Andes in medieval Peru on Legend, all the animals hunt each other appropriately, and some of them even venture into town. Jackdaw type birds sometimes steal baubles. And so on.
Stagecraft definitely has a huge place; not everything must be modeled to a high level of detail. My favorite system I have ever done along those lines is the nonhuman script in Ultima Online. As a primer, you may want to read A Grammar of Orcish by Yorick of Yew.
Based on my species, pick one of the following syllable libraries:
Orcish (heavy on the ughg gaghs)
Chittery (heavy on the kth chkhth)
Slithery (heavy on the ssiss sisshtsh)
Wispish (every consonant, plus the letter y)Also based on my species, set a length of words (in syllables) and a length of sentence (in words).
Every once in a while, saySomething(with no parameters)
If you hear text, you have a chance of calling saySomething(with the overheard text as a parameter)
saySomething(text):
if the passed in text has any of the following words: food, eat, gold, any of the city names, any of the virtue names, any of the major fictional character names like British or Blackthorn, words related to combat, words related to gameplay
pick from the following list of other words: kill, eat, no afraid, scared, attack, hunt, ugly, puny, hate, love, etc.
Build words up to sentence length. If random chance hits, insert one of the list of words instead, or one of the overheard words. End the sentence with a bit of punctuation: ? ! . or … (and capitalize sentences appropriately).
Building words: grab random syllables from your syllable list, up to the word length.
This meant, of course, that if you were near a wisp, and happened to say the word “moongate,” the wisp might respond with “Zthgtts zzkzyz moongate? Yjjkkjwh virtue shrine.”
This led to a sizable number of people believing a large number of urban myths about wisps, including that they tended to hang around healers, that they healed you, that they gave quests, that enhanced bardic abilities, and so on. From the Seekers of the Wisps conference:
Khajja the Fang: On two occasions I have been helped by wisps. I was healed while fighting a gargoyale And once I was assisted by a wisp while fighting an orc mage. It casted offensive spells. That is all.
Aurora Sylvr says: Wisps have been known to do “unusual” things. We have had many reports of them aiding in unfair battles
Khajja the Fang says: So it is not unusual?
Aurora Sylvr says: It’s rare.. but not completely unusual
I don’t even want to think about how much dialogue we were saved from having to write thanks to this trivial little system.
Conclusion
Here’s where I editorialize a little bit. We’ve tended to, over time, focus so much on the quest and kill aspect of these games that we’ve reduced down other elements in favor of this. We no longer have NPCs with schedules because it interferes with getting a quest promptly and killing things faster. We no longer have NPCs that give directions because a radar map is more convenient. We no longer have NPCs that crack a joke when you say something because we’ve removed NPCs hearing you altogether. We no longer have NPCs that take initiative because all interactions must be through menus. We no longer have NPCs that fool people into thinking they are maybe real because it’s confusing.
But there’s fun to be had in those things, and a sizable amount of humor to be mined, and springboards for much further development of other systems. There’s storytelling (will no one have a thought for Sarah’s pain and her desire for Burly Bob’s killers to be brought to justice?).
Players objected quite a lot to seeing the fictional dressing stripped away from the modern quest dispenser NPCs in SWG, seeing them as actual metallic terminals. And yet, that’s how our NPCs act today anyway. We should swing the pendulum back a little bit. I, and I think many other players, would gladly trade some inconvenience for a world that feels a little less like a pellet dispenser.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
(I think that’s an old joke)
More Interesting AI Raph Koster has posted a GOLD MINE of information on the ecological / economic systems of Ultima Online (see part 1, part 2, and part 3), and a discussion on the”dumbing down” of NPCS in MMORPGs. Raph’s comments go on how these sophisticated plans for Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies were eventually deep-sixed in favor of maintainability and simplicity (not to mention catering to players who value predictability). Definitely
because of technical difficulties with spawning, primarily. I think this is a huge shame, because the dynamically appearing closed scenario quests allowed incorporation of a ton of extra variables to allow variability, and could appear almost anywhere.Raph on quests I can not begin to tell you how much this one random spawn meant to me (which for the record, was in prod). I pored way too much time into trying to figure it out, into commenting and speculating and arguing about it on the official forums. I had a
Raph Koster has posted a nice little bit on NPCs in MMOGs, with examples from UO, LegendMUD, and SWG. Some of the stuff regarding UO is interesting because he talks about things that were implemented, but later removed. He laments in today’s games NPCs are nothing more than quest terminals. It
[...] A sense of persistence However, also in UOUltima Online von Electronic Arts., all NPCs were born with a name randomly selected from a few baby book lists that we coded into the game. This meant that on different shards, the NPC tending the forge might have a different name. In fact, everything in UO was this way there were no static, named NPCs or creatures at launch. This cost us the equivalent of slaying Nagafen, but it also led to other, different sorts of feelings. For example, the feeling of coming to the forge one day and seeing that burly Bob the smith, with whom you have dealt for months, was no longer there. Instead, you saw Sarah, whoWarhammer Online von Mythic Entertainment. introduced herself as his niece and informed you that Bob was in fact killed by MasTaKillA, an actual other player. I recall implementing a crude form of this, but I dont remember if we ever deployed it. Memory in general is underexploited in NPCs today. On LegendMUD, the shopkeeper Aasma will remember regular customers for a period of two weeks, offer them specials, and even let them run a tab. This sort of familiarity, even when you know it is all faked with simple tracking mechanisms, actually adds a lot to the experience. Imagine walking into a tavern and having some NPCs greet you as an old friend rather than as a stranger a perfect candidate behavior to be on every friendly shopkeeper in the game. Even better if they can timestamp when they last saw you and say its been a long time! Which naturally leads into Nach meiner Ansicht ein sehr lesenwerter Beitrag, von dem ich nur wnschen kann, dass ihn sich mglichst viele MMORPG Designer hinter die Ohren schreiben. Wobei Raph Koster aber mit Star Wars Galaxies nicht gerade unschuldig daran ist, dass NPCs keine Persnlichkeit mehr haben. Ich teile allerdings nicht seine Ideen zu dynamischen NPCs, die geboren werden, leben und schliesslich sterben. Nicht weil ich das schlecht fnde, sondern weil ich glaube, dass man NPCs nur dann eine echte Persnlichkeit geben kann, wenn man diese von Hand programmiert, ihnen eine Geschichte und Charakter gibt, und das nicht generisch von einem Algorithmus erzeugen lsst. Link: Why dont our NPCsWeitere News zum Thema: WHO: GOA bernimmt europischen Support Raph Koster erklrt das Resourcen System von Ultima Online WHO: Screenshots vom 28.5.2006 WHO: Paul Barnett und warum man Game Designern kein Kaffee geben sollte WHO: Screenshots 22.05.2006 Diskussion im Forum:Frankenstein’s NPC, gebt ihnen Leben! [...]
[...] Raph has written another great article. He talks about a few of the ways that UO and LegendMUD handled NPCs. It’s an interesting read, as usual. It actually sounds like he might be gearing up for some new designs. Bioware Austin should snap him up on the MMO Dream Team He says he “editorializes” a bit at the end, but he’s totally right. NPCs have become vending machines. This is less the designer’s fault and more the player’s. MMOs have become a bandwagon. MP3 players used to be a pretty niche market until everybody started getting into them. Then Apple came out with a consumer-centric device that worked well. Blizzard did the same thing with World of Warcraft. Yes, I said it…WoW is the iPod of the MMO industry. The only difference is that I’m happy as a clam with my iPod and I can’t bring myself to play WoW anymore. Sure, the iPod has some things that I don’t like (iTunes being the top), but it still does the job much better than anyone else in the industry. WoW has taken a step back in the industry. [...]
[...] Comments [...]
[...] Bloggers Matt Mihaly is blogging 7 min 4 sec old, Raph’s Koster Website Training Your Players to Whine 1 hour 32 min old, KillTenRats – Ethic Avatar-Based Marketing 3 hours 4 min old, Raph’s Koster Website Reports From The Field — Second Life Transhumanism Seminar 3 hours 58 min old, Grimwell Why don’t our NPCs… 4 hours 38 min old, Raph’s Koster Website Oh where have you been? 5 hours 58 min old, Brenlo (Alan Crosby) Spring 2006, Week 10, Day 5: Vacation Begins 6 hours 8 min old, Geldon Friday Links 6 hours 30 min old, Amber Night Pwnage and the Lobbyist Grind 7 hours 40 min old, Terra Nova – Academics playground It’s The Dancing, Stupid 7 hours 41 min old, BrokenToys – Lum Enter Fat 9 hours 56 min old, KillTenRats – Ethic Blizzard settles out of court with eBay guide author 10 hours 13 min old, BrokenToys – Lum The Internet Saves Everything 10 hours 36 min old, BrokenToys – Lum Breaking unwritten rules 10 hours 43 min old, Tobold Dark and Light, Free and Not 10 hours 44 min old, AFK Gamer – Foton Do It Yourself Gaming Detox 11 hours 26 min old, AFK Gamer – Foton You need help. Yes, you. 14 hours 37 min old, BrokenToys – Lum Game of Warcraft 17 hours 53 min old, Tobold Spring 2006, Week 10, Day 4: Mehfulness 18 hours 3 min old, Geldon Net Neutrality — Why You Should Care 18 hours 59 min old, Grimwell Hints and Riddles 1 day 5 hours old, Raph’s Koster Website selectparks – MMO surveillance questionnaire 1 day 7 hours old, Raph’s Koster Website We are live 1 day 7 hours old, Amber Night Guild Wars – One More Time For Fun 1 day 8 hours old, KillTenRats – Ethic This Just In: Girls Declared Cooler Than World of Warcraft 1 day 9 hours old, BrokenToys – Lum more [...]
[...] I’ve been thinking about plot generation. There’s a lot of difficulties with plot generation, and a lot of the solutions seem to involve hundreds or thousands of hours of work.But what if instead of plot generation, we do emergent plot?This is hardly new, but I think my idea is relatively fresh.Most people, when they think of this kind of thing, they think of plots which adapt to the player’s choices. For example, if the game lets you shoot someone important and can still ad-lib the plot convincingly, it’s cool.Sure, but that’s not really emergent – it’s just self-repairing and/or variable. Emergent implies that a complex situation comes together from a set of simple rules.To some extent, self-story games feature emergent stories by using the player’s drives and preferences as a catalyst. For example, in many tabletops or LARPs, players often decide that they want to experience a particular kind of story. They want to be the redeemed bad guy. They want to be the faithless clergyman. They want to experience a particular plot arc or just experience the world from a particular angle.In a tabletop or a LARP, this works great because the game world adapts nimbly to these people. If one player is working through a redemption story and another is working through a challenge of faith story, they will tend to naturally harmonize with each other and prod the story along. The game world itself will change to facilitate this, if the GM is any good.Basically, when you’re building a story in a live game, you see kernels of opportunity in the game world and other players. Overtures to work these things into your personal story are usually successful, as the other players bend a little to work you into their story. When it works, it works wonderfully. It’s an emergent narrative, and it’s usually the most interesting part of any given game.There’s two problems with it.First is the obvious problem: it relies on the adaptability of human beings. Computers have a much harder time adapting.The second problem is much more insidious: these plots are fueled by in-game opportunities. It’s become clearer and clearer that players think in terms of using what they are shown, not engineering new content. Even the players which are exceptions to this rule and think in terms of engineering new content and long-term plots are insufficient to do the task: they simply don’t have the means to provide other players with opportunities that those players can latch on to.Now, the first problem is a problem which faces computer games. The second problem is a problem which faces live games, but can be solved by computer games.So, I’m going to concentrate on the first point: adaptability.Usually, when I talk about a generative plot system, I talk about an incremental system. That means that a player is given a little bit of data, then makes a choice and is rewarded with another event and more data. These are not pre-planned chains of events. The path the player will follow is forged as the player walks it, but in such a way as to convince the player that they are in the midst of a complex and interesting plot.The idea is that there is a kind of rules system for determining what kind of progressions there are. There may also be a kind of “guide” system which keeps the plot on track rather than letting it wander around at random – there are lots of ways to do it. It is, either way, a highly complex system.So, I saw Raph’s NPC post, right on the tail of his ecology posts. I didn’t get any further than the first sentence: “In thinking about the UO resource system in recent posts (1, 2, 3), I also got to thinking about other things that we either wanted to or tried to get the NPCs to do.”(Yeah, I read it later, but the rest has only a little do to with this concept.)I thought to myself, “hey, ecologies of NPCs have been tried before. In fact, I’ve tried them before. But there’s a nugget of newness here, descended from Chu Chu Rocket and Carnage Heart.”So this is the “chu chu carnage” theory of emergent plot creation.Imagine your NPCs are components on a 2D field. The Incredible Machine style – lots of weird kinds of components.The basic idea is that the player can run around and tweak these components. The player can point them in a new direction, or change the color of their laser, or even move them if they are moveable components. This is pretty similar to the Incredible Machine in most ways, but it runs continuously instead of play-stop-rearrange.It would be fun: the player would get to experiment with making components do fun combinations of things. Instead of a simple reward system, you make a really complex reward system. If you fire a green laser here, you get a bonus, sure. But you also get a bonus if you create a blue laser feedback loop or if you can pop fifteen balloons in three seconds. Instead of having all your goals as specific to a level, you have goals which are universal to all levels. Such as blue laser feedback loops: any level you get a blue feedback loop in, you get a bonus.Of course, this is just an example. The real goals would be far simpler with far more complex results. For example, any laser feedback loop, but the color determines what kind of bonus you get.Now, here’s the other half of the equation: that TIM-like image is just what you see when you design the game. The player simply sees the city he is wandering around in, and talks to people. To him, our “blue laser” is “love” or something. If the game world is complex enough, we might allow the player to see the real logic map as well, as that way he could plot out his course. But I imagine that level of complexity is not needed.The idea is that the player will be running around hooking people up or making people angry or whatever. Instead of having generic NPC AI systems which adapt to this, each NPC is a kind of “component” that deals with the various social stuff in relatively simple ways. Simple but malleable and adaptive – changing even without the player there to tweak it. For example, a common component might fire a blue laser at anyone who fires a blue laser at her. Or another person who fires a blue laser at everyone of the other gender within reach.The rules governing the objects would be relatively simple and not something that can always be ruled by the player. For example, maybe that waffling component will only settle down when focused on by a single blue laser for some time, so the way the player gets the waffler to settle is by interfering with anyone else who wants to fire a blue laser at her.Anyhow, the point is that you don’t have a bunch of largely interchangeable NPCs. You have NPCs which are carefully placed and designed so that they have the potential to create a fun plot. I’ve used primarily romantic examples, but the same basic idea could apply to getting people to go hunt a dragon with you, or convincing thieves to rob a bank, or anything else. The idea is that the components are carefully placed so that there is a system-wide reaction when the player changes something significant, and that system-wide reaction is a plot.What makes this different from a normal plot, aside from the difficulty of designing a level? Well, first, it gives the NPCs a feeling of being alive (if handled correctly). Second, when the situation gets complex, it allows the player to be innovative. For example, if the player knows the situation well, he can plan ahead and tweak a critical piece, causing a very different cascade than the one you originally planned for.Also, you could allow players to have a lot of control over creating their own plots by “pushing pieces into place”. Imagine a tactical game where the members of your team are these kinds of components, and the team itself has fun social dynamics. I think it would be a whole lot of fun to try to get the team socially working together.I’ll try to work out a more specific implementation soon, but I think this “chu chu carnage” social system could work really well.
[...]
[...] Raph Koster blogs about current NPCs in games in a recent post. [...]
[...] Why dont our NPCson Raph Koster Why dont our NPCson Raph Koster Quote: [...]
[...] Ambition is a funny thing. I’m speaking here of the ambitions that we might have for our work, the hopes that it might entertain or touch people, and the hopes that it will do well financially. It was interesting to read the comments on the posts on interesting NPCs and UO’s resource system (1, 2, 3.) and see so many of the players get excited about possibilities — and so many of the developers wonder if it was worth the effort. [...]
[...] Also, it’s more than a little ironic that we’re talking about this shortly after Raph discussed how the UO team implemented a similar hand-crafted system into UO. http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/09/why-dont-our-npcs/ Name Email Website Your comment [...]
[...] Raph Koster ber NPCs in Onlinespielen einer der Onlinespiele Gurus, der u.a. Spiele wie Ultima Online, Star Wars und Everquest II mit designed hat, schrieb einen sehr interessanten Artikel ber NPCs. Darin sieht man, dass NPCs immer weniger real wurden im Lauf der Online Geschichte und was es fr Mglichkeiten gbe. Sehr anregend zu lesen! http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/09/why-dont-our-npcs/ "In thinking about the UO resource system in recent posts, I also got to thinking about other things that we either wanted to or tried to get the NPCs to do. Today, NPCs have gradually evolved more and more towards being quest dispensers. Originally, we wanted NPCs that would give the illusion of life. But there were a few bumps on the road, and today NPCs in all the games pretty much suck. Moving around was actually one of the biggest bumps. One of the most obvious cues that an NPC is actually nothing more than a quest dispenser is to make them immobile terminals with hovering icons over their head. Yet this is what players demand. In early UO the NPCs moved about there was even some attempt to make them move about purposefully, from trade implement to trade implement, but that failed. When the NPCs would move around while you were trying to talk to them, players objected, and then eventually the NPCs were frozen in place because their primary purpose was as a dispenser of items. I fought this for a long time because I hated the notion of reducing the NPCs back down Anyway, heres some of the big areas that I think are hugely underexploited in NPCs today." Mehr, siehe beigefgten Link. [...]
[...] I WAS exited about nwn2, but recent news has been turning me increasingly off. First there were the allusions to the memory footprint of outdoor areas. Since the amount of memory that 32 bit windows (64 bit is explicitly unsupported) can support in a single process is rather small, this puts an instant kibosh on large worlds unless you go to a server cluster rather than a single server. This is still viable, true; but considerably more expensive to support than a single server. The issue with the lack of DM client at launch seems to have blown over, but two other things haunt me. A regular on the bio boards pointedly asked if there will be a standalone server and as yet, a few days later, no dev has given an definitive answer. That gives me the impression that it is on the to do if there is time list and there is never enough time in software projects. The pessimist in me expects nwn2 to ship without initial support for a standalone server. Having to host a PW from the player or DM client makes it that much harder to host one 24/7. Lastly, it is not yet clear exactly what must be pre-downloaded by the players before they can connect. In any case the walkmesh will have to be downloaded. If it were just the walkmesh, it would be annoying, but not the end of the world. It would mean that server updates could not go online at will, but would have to be announced in advance so everyone could get the new files downloaded. If it includes other info beyond the walkmesh, then we are in for a new era of enhanced metagaming. What Id like to see in general (not limited to any server): Everyone mentions dynamism. Dynamisn is HARD to implement. Real dynamism http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/09/why-dont-our-npcs/ You can kind of fake it with a couple of things: [...]
[...] FFB: Raph Koster recently posted a post on his weblog with great examples of making NPCs something MORE than just random quest dispensers. Certainly, most of these examples are things that we probably won’t see for some time in an MMOG, at least not all of them together. But can you tell us if there are any plans to make NPCs in PotBS more immersive? For example, I read that it will be possible to actually get relationships with certain NPCs, do you still have things like this planned? JL: We have a very extensive and dynamic single-player storyline planned for PotBS. And by dynamic, I mean that the choices you make as a player will change the way the story unfolds around you. For example, if two NPCs offer competing missions, then there will be rewards and CONSEQUENCES for the choices you make. The NPC you help out will develop a relationship with you, treating you as a friend, while the one you snub will treat you as an enemy. Certain new missions will be open to you, while others may close. Beyond the single-player experience, there will be an element of diplomacy to the overall game as well. If you make it your life’s work to hunt down the Bloody Arms Pirates, then they’ll likely, well, hate you—which means they’ll target you whenever they get the chance and never offer you any missions. But at the same time, the British Navy might smile on you for cleaning out the riffraff (even if you’re not a member of the British nation), offering protection on the high-seas and special missions in their ports. Of course, in persistent areas you’ll also see NPCs going about their daily lives. In pirate towns, NPCs can get into fights. In military outposts you’ll see soldiers going through drills. In the taverns you’ll see drunks, well, getting drunk. You can expect a lot of pirate-themed activity on the wharfs and in the towns. Gambling, cat calls, street-musicians, peddlers, swimmers, fishermen . . . nearly anything you can image happening in a town in 1720 you will find. [...]
[...] After a week in Coalbrookdale, near Ironbridge, near Telford playing with iron casting, smelting and liquid metal, my thoughts are much more situated in the natural world than the computerised one. To ease back into my technological side, here’s a strange structure which bridges the gap between the two: an animal-controlled version of Pac Man, with crickets acting as ghosts (look for graduation projects from 2003/2004).From creator Wim van Eck’s colleague’s blog:In his project he build a Pacman game, in that the player can play Pacman against real crickets, that controls the ghosts in the Pacman maze. By doing this he analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of real-time behaviour of live animals in comparison to behavior-generating code in computer games. A very clever approach to examining AI in computer games. More of a trawl through the bursting RSS feeder exposes that Raph was thinking along similar lines (without the crickets) in an essay he posted about what we need (and should start to expect) from NPC characters. He focuses heavily upon MMOGs, but the points he raises are relevant across the gaming spectrum. Via his blog:Players objected quite a lot to seeing the fictional dressing stripped away from the modern quest dispenser NPCs in SWG, seeing them as actual metallic terminals. And yet, that’s how our NPCs act today anyway. We should swing the pendulum back a little bit. I, and I think many other players, would gladly trade some inconvenience for a world that feels a little less like a pellet dispenser. There are still a few issues to work out in Eck’s project before crickets become the benchmark for in-game AI, however. At one point, a bug shed its skin thus rendering the colour-detection system completely ineffective. Game over. The NPC challenge still remains, and is one of the hardest nuts to crack in the mainstream acceptance of gaming as an artistic and respectable medium. [...]
[...] In games where even spear-carriers are promoted to special status, by features such as more varied NPC conversation systems, capabilities to give rumors, persistence (such as persistent randomly-named but killable shopkeepers, like UO had), or even procedural quest generation, then you end up wanting to make even your spear-carriers have these characteristics. If Falstaff happens to be rolled up, has something memorable attached to him, and hangs around in the bad part of town for six weeks until he is killed and never returns, that can be of real value. His hat can still be a trophy. [...]
[...] My favorite is still the stuff that surrounded the wisps in Ultima Online. I wrote about it in a blog post about NPCs: Stagecraft definitely has a huge place; not everything must be modeled to a high level of detail. My favorite system I have ever done along those lines is the nonhuman script in Ultima Online. As a primer, you may want to read A Grammar of Orcish by Yorick of Yew. [...]
[...] I wish I had known about Mr. Koster’s blog a long time ago, there have been some great posts there. In particular, I love this one: Why dont our NPCs [...]
[...] here is an interesting article about NPC’s http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/09/why-dont-our-npcs/ [...]
[...] Raph’s blog and what he is saying. How I forgot to have Raph Koster’s blog listed eludes me. But recently he talked about the ecology that was originally planned/attempted in the early UO and the reasons that it didn’t work (Part 1, 2, 3).Which is very interesting to me, since I have been reading up what I can. In a strangely related piece UO had helped me while reading “Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity”. In the preface Dr. Holland uses the word “untrammeled”, which is a word that I never expected to see in print and only know the meaning because of the facet debates (putting it nicely). Someone had found and listed the definition of trammel: literary restrictions or impediments to freedom of action and is the name of the non-pvp facet in UO (I can only guess that the designer that came up with the name might not have liked the idea of non-pvp facet). Side note, the book is pretty good, but it can be hard reading for a layman and probably a bit deeper than what could be workable for a game setting.Raph also has a great write-up about NPC’s. Where he compares them to “pellet dispenser”, which isn’t far from the truth. Also nothing breaks the suspension of reality when you have a NPC with a big green “!” above their head.I can only hope that the right people are reading Raph’s ideas (despite my desire, I don’t kid myself about being able to build something so complex). Who knows, maybe someone with lots of money to throw around could get Raph and Richard Bartle together to design a MMO. [...]
[...] by Michael Chui on Mon Oct 01, 2007 11:07 pm Scopique wrote:And don’t forget the stuff that didn’t MAKE it into UO, like the dynamic ecosytem.If you have no idea what he’s talking about,http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/03/uo … ce-system/http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/04/uo … em-part-2/http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/05/uo … em-part-3/Also,http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/09/why-dont-our-npcs/ [...]
[...] great example comes from this Raph Koster blog entry where he discusses (under “Faking You Out”) some shenanigans pulled by UO. Stagecraft [...]