@devs: Some feedback and suggestions from a newbie

[Seytra]

I don\'t see the light issue, actually. Sure, there are some places that are really dark, but IMO they aren\'t too dark. I have set my monitors brightness a tad higher than the default is, and I can navigate the DR and sewers very well. This brightness setting also is fine for normal usage. Also, in my experience, the 3rd person views provide better view in dark areas, and IMO also better maneuverability, so try using one of them, as has been suggested already.

As for the widened paths: they already are widened: you can stand with one foot over the edge and not fall. Klyros have a lot of trouble with their height and width, but I can by now run out of the DR, mostly without interruption. I admit that I must walk on the very edge of the path, though, but that will be gone once the height and width issues are fixed.

Why should getting out of the DR be easy, anyway? You should be happy that you actually can get back to life at all!

[Moogie]

I havn\'t found a single walkable path in the Death Realm which is dark enough to disorientate me in the slightest. My monitor\'s brightness is normal. Are you sure you arn\'t experiencing the lighting bug?

[Seytra]

The stairs at the skull are really very dark when in 1st person mode, dark enough to get lost. 3rd person views fix that, though, at least for me.

Hmmm... speaking of bugs: this could also be one of the OS specific bugs... you\'re not, by chance, on a MAC?

[keder]

Originally posted by Moogie
I havn\'t found a single walkable path in the Death Realm which is dark enough to disorientate me in the slightest. My monitor\'s brightness is normal. Are you sure you arn\'t experiencing the lighting bug?

either the darkness bug or the gamma issues that have been mentioned. i know i play on 5 different stations, all have the brightness/contrast set to equal settings so the monitors look the same side by side in normal windows and viewing the same web pages. each one looks different in PS, one i can\'t turn the brightness up high enough to make the deathrealm navigatable (logout and wait till i can log in at a different station), two i have to be turn all the way up (they are normally at around 30%) and the other two look fine as is. in other games, i adjust the in-game gamma setting once the first time i play, and don\'t have to make any other adjustments.

--- keder maloy

[bubzy]

how abuot introducing some kind of \"newbie induction period\" whereupon when they die they dont go to the underworld at all, they just respawn in the main area, and after x hours of gameplay or so many levels/experience points, they are no lnoger considered a new player and are subject to laws that were initially not controlling them. (ultima online young system)

[Pestilence]

hmm well the ?oungsystem\"might be an idea but it seems a bit strange to me to die but don\'t go to the eathrealm becuase your new :S

As for the lighting. Well I don\'t have any problems, but apparently some do and so why not make it a little less dark? Or atleast give gammacontrols ingame to the player.

Up the stairs? Didn\'t fall down to often myself. A few times ofcourse, but the most annoying part was really not being able to walk where you should be able to and getting stuck in the wall and aslong as that\'s not fixed I wouldn\'t mind it being wider a little bit. You should play a game for fun and being stuck at a place you can\'t chose to try something else is frustrating.

[Nightrogue]

~Interesting!
Looong time ago i implemented a simple textual adventure game - the concept was from a c64 magazine but i think i ported it to qbasic on a 286 that time ... I don\'t remember how the system worked but roughly you did some lexicons/dictionaries of subjects, object, fill-words and actions. It was setup in a way that it knew synonyms. Then coding was like if objectNr3 and actionNr5 and subjectNr 40 is inside the sentence, then ...
It also allowed to chain phrases with \"and\". It worked impressively well.~


I dont know if this will be useful or not, but one thing you could do is download the A.L.I.C.E (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) open source project and use that as a reference to what sort of noun/verb/pronoun/adjective responses you should have. A.L.I.C.E is probably the most human-like AI ever made, so you should at least be able to get some ideas.

[Madcrimson]

Maybe it\'s me, but I\'ve not been able to exchange more than a few sentences with ALICE before getting annoyed.

I guess to provide good natural language capacities there are several choices to look at:

1. The talking head experiments by Luc Steels et. al. showed very promising results. The main idea is to talk about things in view space during a guessing game. The agents build up discrimination trees during subsequent games and so come to a more and more sufficient understanding of each others utterances. What I most like about this approach is, that
a) the agents can be trained by the players so the devs don\'t have to do all the teaching, programming etc.,
b) the language will be the language used by the players and even multiple words (e.g. table, Tisch and mesa) can be used to reference the same thing and
c) synonyms, hyponyms etc. are sorted into a taxonomy naturally.

2. A (top level) ontology like DOLCE, WordNet, SUMO, OpenCyC, BFO etc. can be incorporated and fleshed out to look up the meaning of things. This will  definitively be a loooot of work but may provide the NSCs with a certain understanding of the players\' utterances.
I\'d prefer to use DOLCE+WordNet since DOLCE is a very clean structured ontology and provided in KIF and OWL. WordNet is quite large and there is an adaptation from WordNet to DOLCE provice, discussed in Gangemi et.al., \"Sweetening Ontologies with DOLCE\", 2002.
Also one should take a look at http://wonderweb.semanticweb.org where the deliverables D17  and D18 are about the same topic.
But enough reference spamming for now...

Of course, the best would be to combine both approaches to make the NPCs really smart. AFAIK nobody has done this by now :-D
 
So much from me,
MC