"What is your name, little girl?"
"Umm ... umm ... ... I forgot!"
The point being that, just because 99% of Klyros females in Hydlaa would know their name, not necessarily all would.
So .. if you are going to have a table of questions that all NPC's can answer, you should be able to cause any particular NPC or group of NPC's not to know that >specific< answer.
Obvious things every NPC would be likely to know ... (seem to remember categorised knowledge bases being mentioned before)
Global geographical knowledge
Local geographical knowledge
Geography = geography, climate, flora, fauna, landmarks, districts, streets, general businesses
Global social knowledge
Local social knowledge
Social = politicians, leaders, criminals, neighbours, business people
General racial knowledge
Gender specific racial knowledge
Racial = physiology, culture, inherent talents & limitations, enmities & affiliations
General skill knowledge
Specific skill (relevant to personal accomplishment) knowledge
Skill (any ingame skill, coded or otherwise) = overview, mechanics of practice, specific techniques
Local, racial, gender and age related extensions/restrictions should be applied to each general category to get the RP immersion that PS has been aiming at
I dont know what improvements have been made to the Quest development interface and the underlying code that supports it, so please forgive any redundancy in the suggestions below ...
All knowledge base information should be organised, preferably within a hierarchy of categories, with values associated with each item of knowledge which reflects the general likelihood that that information would be known to a character of average knowledge in that particular area.
For example:
An NPC in Hydlaa could be assumed to have average knowledge of geography in Hydlaa and would have a +0 modifier to their likelihood of knowing/recalling some piece of information.
However, an NPC with a geographer tag might have +40 to know that information, but, being only 10 and not really a geographer but only the child of one, they might have -40 for their age and +5 for being the child of a geographer. So .. +40 -40 +5 = the kid has a +5% chance to know/remember that piece of information.
Each new character would have to have certain tags set, eg Age, Gender, Race, District, Area, Profession, Skills etc. These tags would result in a default set of offsets to their probability of knowing anty particular bit of information.
When a member of the Settings team creates a character, they would specify the tags and the character (unless the creator specifies otherwise) would inherit all knowledge in every knowledge base but also the default offsets according to the characters tags.
Additionally, the creator could tweak the knowledge base offsets individually andor decide that certain questions would or would not be within the NPC's area of knowledge.
Over and above that, the creator could specify character specific overrides on the answers to certain questions. IE the questions that the creator specifically allocates offsets and answes to on that character's definityion should generally come before all inherited knowledge base answers.
Yep, I know, you cant be assed
But if you work that way you will save yourselves a lot of time and effort.
Okay, beyond that you have the annoying problem, if the quest designer is roughly the same as it was three years ago, that any attitudes you want an NPC to reflect are really going to have to be put in by hand.
Thats obviously always going to be the best option when you go for a method that is more or less one question one answer (or one question select from a number of answers with the same meaning).
But think about the fact that people from different countries have different expressions for things with basicaly the same meaning, eg Goddamnit! ~ Zut alors!
It is the different way of saying it brings the character to life. So suppose you have something like this ..
Categories: 10 years, male, Klyros, Slum, Hydlaa
Conversational Tone: Discontented Agreement
Perhaps the character creator chooses the Conversational Tone based on specific criteria or perhaps that is automatically selected by the game according to some aspect or another of the player character.
Each age, gender, race, location etc would have its own configuration of conversational interjection for each of the keywords in the 'sentence' below according to the tone of the NPC's conversation.
For example: [Expletive] [Augmentative] [Preamble] [Content]
"
[May the wings of the blue one be clipped!] [It is a dismal day] [that my feathers brush your brows]. [content->] I have heard that Councilllor Yfelgroen may be [feathering his nest with down from the breast of] Lady Swift Aloft!
In the tone of Discontented Agreement, in the context of a middle aged Kyros slum dweller in Hydlaa, the emboldened phrases are filled in depending on the tags for the NPC.
[Comment] is defined as:
I have heard that Councilllor Yfelgroen may be [selfishly appropriative of] Lady Swift Aloft!
To get an atmospheric response, each element in [] is repeatedly processed (according to the NPC's tags) until the final dialog is created.
Yep .. I know .. you dont want to do all the work that is involved in creating something so elegant. But if you took a few months to set up something as infinitely expandable as that, then your next 10 years would be 10 times more productive.
Consider what you would achieve if you had someone assigned to creating dialog for each race according to location, gender and age!
