slicker NPC communication

[hook]

english langage is actually pretty simple ...and the AI doesn\'t actually need to understand all of it ...just understand sentences - you can understand someone speaking a totally foreign language even if you\'re not good at it, right?

[Ineluke]

Originally posted by Cirque
Obviously they fast click through the menus because they choose to.

You say what you dislike, then use other peoples situations and or circumstances as an example. If you have to conform with what other people do then I can understand why you would say that.

Im more than willing to give an example of the above applied to another situation.

This is true. If you didn\'t like the text would you want to have to use it to comunicate with the npcs?

I think they should have both and you can chose on the fly. That way you can ise menu if you get stuck or if you really want to you can just speed click. It wont help you to speed click however beacuse then you dont know what to do to complete the quest.

[cryofame]

For those of you that do remember Zork, you should remember that it had a system that parsed the input line into a sequence of tokens that were then matched to an expected set of commands.  for instance: \"go to the west\" would equate to the same thing as \"go west\", \"pick up the damn screwdriver\" would be the same as \"get the screwdriver\" and \"get screwdriver\"

IIRC how it worked was that it first removed all unnecessary verbiage such as \"the\" and \"it\" and broke it down to mostly verbs and nouns. It then converted synonyms to a single word to make it easier to find the action to take. for instance \"toss\", \"chuck\", \"hurl\", and \"fling\" all were converted to \"throw\". By using something similar to this you can get quite good results.

One example of how a parser might work for a game can be read at the following website http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/commpars.htm

If you took the suggestion from that page to create an object-oriented parser for an input line that would be quite interesting.

If you further added some kind of soundex breakdown of the parsed line you could catch some of the common misspellings that people make and increase the accuracy of the server to recognie what people are saying. If you don\'t know what soundex is then check out http://www.highprogrammer.com/alan/numbers/soundex.html for a good description of it\'s uses.  I would expect the soundex to only be used as a last resort if it wasn\'t caught by normal matching.

For the point-n-click crowd, it would be easy enough to populate a list of automatic reponses to a specific NPC and cache it on the client\'s end for those that choose to have a point-n-click experience.  The role-players could turn off the point-n-click functionality whenever they want to (or Turn it on if it defaults to being off).


No matter which way Planeshift goes I think that it will be pretty cool

p.s. I do hope that the developers put into place some kind of logging of discussions with NPCs so that they can fine tune the conversations as well as the soundex method to catch common misspellings and sound-alike words.  That would be truly amazing to see!

[Icefalcon]

Yeah, Planeshift will have a good system like that. Its not like it will be that the NPCs can never understand you, thats no problem. The point these non-rpers are trying to make is that having the whole conversation by typing in your own sentances should be eliminated and replaced with a boring option click system.

[grand_diablo]

Sorry for digging out this old topic, but I guess this still is an issue.

I dont mind that NPCs currently say $@! instead of \"you\", which seems to be minor bug anyway, but the current dialogue system is really painful.

I see the roleplaying aspects of it, but its just too complicated and exhausting. You will find a normal Poin & Click like Dialogue system in almost every MMORPG today, no matter if its more focused on RP than on gaming or not. I know that Planeshift is going to be different in several ways, and I like and appreciate that, but some things - like the dialogue system - would better be \"copied\" from the majority.

Don\'t forget that a better dialogue system would make the game a lot friendlier for newcomers too, and before you start implementing thousands of new keywords, a normal dialogue system would save time longterms.

However the devs will decide, keep up the good work!

[NIm]

Effectivley, your trying to build an AI that will pass the Turing test, soemthing hich decades of computer scientists having been unable to do.

However, NPCs in planeshift don\'t even have to come close.

A better parsing system needs to be developed. any words that the ai doesn\'t know will be removed, and any nouns/words left should be included in the \"I don\'t understand\" remark.

\"Go give this hammer to guildmaster bob\"
becomes:
Go * * hammer * * *

Go is a know verb, therefor, the ai reapeats the understandable parts of the sentance back o you:
\"Go do what with the hammer?\"


Not a task to be taken lightly. I believe it is a ridiculous amount of work, but with an English major, you could do it. too bad my major is Computer Science

[grand_diablo]

well, before doing this for each and every dialogue, a menu based communication would be better and saved time.

Those who are interested, will still read what NPCs say. Those who are not that patient every time, feel kinda forced to something they dont want the way it is now.

I am not a roleplayer, still im interested in the storys the NPCs tell me, but not in every single one. And by now I havent even managed to get a single quest, because its seems something is broken (words get randomly replaced by $@! ). And without quests, all I can do is running around and enjoy the view, basically.

A menu based system would
a) make the game far more newcomer friendly
b) save time for the developers (im pretty sure about that), they could invest in some other parts of PS
c) it would not stop roleplayers and interested ones from fully reading what the NPCs say. I mean, this system works in other MMORPGs too, even on the RP only servers.

[tangerine]

The dialog system first searches for groups of words that it knows (e.g. \"sword\", \"give me\" ) and ignores everything unknown. Synonyms are recognized and translated. Then it compares this simplified sentence with sentences it has in its database. If it fails, it tries to generalize parts of the sentence and tries to find the generalized sentences e.g. when you type \"where can I buy mace\" it could generalize that to \"where can I buy weapon\" and recognize that. The problem is probably that the database is lacking enough generalizations and synonyms etc. or quests are bugged. Everything written by players that was not understood is saved into database, but I don\'t know if anybody is reviewing these records.

[digganob]

NPC: We\'re having a serrious problem in the mines.

Player: What sort of problem?
NPC: I don\'t understand.

Player: What is the problem?
NPC: I don\'t understand.

Player: what problem?
NPC: I don\'t understand.

Player: What\'s wrong with the mines?
NPC: I don\'t understand.

Player: What problem are you having with the mines?
NPC: I don\'t understand.

Player: Problem in mines?
NPC: I don\'t understand.

Player: What is the problem in the mines?
NPC: I don\'t understand.

Player: The mines.  What is the f%$&*# problem in your god #$&* mines?
NPC: You kiss your mother with that mouth?

Player: What kind of serrious problem are you having in the mines?
NPC: I don\'t understand.

Player: How serrious?
NPC: Oh, it\'s really bad.  The workers refuse to go in because they\'ve heard rumors that the mine is cursed.

Player: What kind of curse?
NPC: I don\'t understand.

Player: Do you need more workers?
NPC: I don\'t understand.

Player:  How do you break the curse?
NPC: I don\'t understand.

Player:  Who started these rumors?
NPC: I don\'t understand.

Player:  What about the curse?
NPC: I don\'t understand.

Player:  Where are the workers now?
NPC: I don\'t understand.

Player:  You\'ll understand when I shove my axe up your butt!!!!
NPC:  I would be so greatful if you would retrieve the sacred pick-axe for me.

Player: I don\'t understand!

[Ponytail]

A text-based-system will never be as precice as a menu.

The thing i dislike most is that i do not even know if it is worth the time trying dozens of possibilities.

Try to improve the actual system, if you will manage to do that it will be great. Just let me see it when a NCS does not have anything more to tell me. thx

[Geode]

I think we should reflect on how you dialogue with NPCs in everquest. they talk and talk, but put vital information that you should repeat; or put into your sentance/question in brackets.
an Example:

Player: hello

NPC: hello, i am name name. i am looking for my [lost book]

Player: \"lost book?\" or \"what lost book?\" or simply \"lost book\"

NPC: Yes, i was fishing one day at the [docks] and i did not notice it was gone until i got home.

Player: What docks?

NPC: the docks near the inn, will you help me [retrieve my book]?

Player: Yes, i will retrieve your book.

NPC: Thank you, I will look forward to seeing you and my book again very soon.
_____________________________

A nice compromise between the people that want to click, and the administration that wants to keep typable dialogue am i right? As well as clearing up such unneccesary confusion.

(edit) and while we\'re on the subject, i believe you should add a quickbutton to greet an NPC and begin dialogue, a hail, or greet button. just a neat little idea

[Masato]

Originally posted by hook
english langage is actually pretty simple ...and the AI doesn\'t actually need to understand all of it ...just understand sentences - you can understand someone speaking a totally foreign language even if you\'re not good at it, right?

Don\'t be too optimistic. Technically English is one of the easier languages, but you can say the same thing on tons of ways.

Ex: the Blacksmith/Gold Ore quest:
- Here is your ore.
- Is this enough ore ?
- I give you the ore.
- I have it.
- I mined it.

Those 5 sentences (I skipped variations of them by different wording) are completely different, in sense and wording, but all leads to the same: giving the ore to the smith. (If I thought more than a single minute over it, I\'m sure I easyly could create 10-12 of them, without duplicates in the sense. - And this is just a cheap give-ore-to-smith-task.)

The fast-click-through-problem can be reduced a lot if you don\'t give the reader the 50 pages epic story with a yes/no at the end, but a way to choose details to read by itself. Whith a good choose on the detail hirarchy the user didn\'t get bored on details which aren\'t interesting (to the user).

Greetings

[Lutz]

Originally posted by hook
english langage is actually pretty simple ...and the AI doesn\'t actually need to understand all of it ...just understand sentences - you can understand someone speaking a totally foreign language even if you\'re not good at it, right?

actually, the english language is one of the HARDEST languages to learn. The Latin-based languages are one of the easiest ones to learn. and I mean languages like Spanish, French, etc... English is the most widely used languages in business today, but it doesn\'t mean it\'s the easiest one to learn

[Kaseijin]

i don\'t know if french is easier then english...
it\'s got gender for things...
i find english easier then a lot of other european languages...
i am not saying it\'s better....just easier

actually a lot asian languages have much easier and stable grammar then european... ok...that\'s whole different story though

[grand_diablo]

Well, implementing a neat multiple-choice dialogue system will be 10 times faster than getting this text based thing to work at least averagely precise + you have much more work on implementing new quests and so on.
And I guess it is impossible to make it work newbie friendly enough, so not half of the new players wont be scared away by it.


TEXT BASED
+ more realistic
+ RP friendlier
- complicated
- time intensive
- newbie scaring
- will never work totally precise
- harder to implement, more work in long terms when adding new quests and stuff

MULTIPLE CHOICE
+ Simpler
+ newbie friendly
+ easier to implement. less work in long terms
+ cant really work imprecise
+ time saving
- not so much RP feeling

well, do the Cost/use calculation