RE: writing scripts
A clockwork is possible. Just very hard. Again, a "speed is money; how fast can you afford" issue of resources. If a clockwork is an ultimate goal, set it then by degrees work to it. I am thinking of a server world that maintains a modular set of worlds around it. The privilege or role of a user that logs in determines which worlds they can be in, which powers (commands and data) they have affect over per world, and what they can carry from world to world. This is something classical literature and many movies achieve with their separate realms that can send agents to the middle world (think Shemp Howard as the angel in the dream). Except what our medium allows is for all of these worlds to be simultaneously active. But the prime directive is still illusion maintenance, and so we set up the hierarchy of powers and rules of interface (sounds like OOP to me but with XSLT and XML for messaging, transactions, and remediation (no rollback)). Anyway, the lord of such a world is not disengaged fully. The restriction was illusion maintenance; god uses the agents and sticks to self-imposed rules. In this thread, I am using this metaphor because it is reasonably clear how roles are assigned and offers the potential to categorize hierarchies of agents that inherit capability and interface. The thread is to look at the properties of a script that can enable it to be self-transforming. We have to out the properties of self-transformation but frame them within the constraints of illusion maintenance. The theology is convenient and let's me play with images and characters that can be created and sustained. However, the tech side is to point out that the X3D/XML/XSLT combination can be extremely powerful and give us tools to author that are much easier to work with than programming in the EAI/SAI. While the EAI can be the realtime interface, the universality of the XML syntax enables us to build all of the other languages we need to persist property values across episodes and transform them. That I choose in this instance of a storyworld to call them spells, miracles, devices, guises, etc. is simply to make them accessible from the GUI in a way that naturally leads an author to understand their purpose. In reality, they are probably UMEL resources for that world. For a story world to be even more interesting, one would sustain multiple plotlines that can intersect, overlap, and alter each other almost the way that occasionally sitcom stars cameo in each others shows. Len http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h -Original Message- From: Jed Hartman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, December 04, 2000 8:42 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: writing scripts As always, wish I had more time to participate in this discussion... Also as always, I'm inclined to overlay my tabletop-RPG views on this. (Perhaps Lurker Par has some thoughts about how all this plays out in existing MUDs, such as the groundbreaking work he and his company are doing now at http://www.skotos.net -- I envision this kind of thing eventually being a back-end to interactive stories of the type we're talking about, with a 3D graphics display system in place of text descriptions -- there are a lot of ways in which the problems being solved are different in these two cases, but also, I think, a lot of similarities.) In most RPGs, the GM does not -- cannot -- just set a clockwork universe into motion and step back, because someone has to play the part of Len's devils and angels -- non-player characters, inanimate objects, all the incidents and accidents that interfere with or promote character goals. [Um, it's come to my attention recently that many people these days use the term "RPG" to refer to video games in which you go through a sequence of adventures killing everything in your path. I suppose this is a reasonable usage -- until a recent review in Strange Horizons I had no idea that these games had true storylines, and I'm still a bit mystified as to how that works -- but it's not how I use the term; I'm talking about traditional Dungeons Dragons-style roleplaying games, where everything takes place in the players' and GM's imaginations, perhaps aided by pencils and paper and dice.] But there are a lot of different GMing philosophies -- and a lot of different tricks. Some GMs try to come as close to the clockwork universe as possible: they create a detailed world, they create vast hordes of NPCs, and then they do their best to play those NPCs as if they were real people with real goals. Other GMs are trickier, manipulating things from behind the scenes to ensure that things go the way they want, changing motivations and even facts on the fly as long as they're not already known to the player characters. (Think Schrodinger's Cat: if the PCs don't know somet
RE: writing scripts
I agree with your assessment. Thanks for this reference. Excellent reading. I looked at the Skotos site and inevitably we come back to the issues of text MUD vs 3D real time stories. Protocol and how to parse a protocol as always becomes the design challenge. We have discussed this before in terms of commands, gestures and even emotional language files and when you look at sites like Cybertown, you see the bare beginnings of commands for simple behaviors, plus they regularly host real time events with some aspects of role playing. A text interface and a 3D interface may overlap. It certainly solves the problems of command and control in text; OTOH, it is typing intensive, relies on learning a vocabulary, and seems to rely on guides for escapes. This isn't ideal but there are lots of ideas that do transfer the real time 3D world well. Interaction means controls and it is tough to hide them without real time speech and that of course, makes the automation of devils and angels extremely expensive (won't pass a turing test). Yet without a richer medium, the skotos experience seems to be a kind of interactive radioplay. I like Kimberly's story writing articles. As I said before, one may want to abandon the inherent linearity of stories, or learn how to hide plot driving devices. Much of what she talks about is directly text related and one has to figure out how to translate that into 3D stuff. The crux is still the illusion of free will and managing that by context. She notes a vital point and that is the ability to affect globals. Globals are key to producing sideeffects and uncertainty (what XSLT assiduously avoids for the same reason). Very good site. I note they are already using XML. It will be interesting to see if they mine the markup gold mine of the Hytime work and look at some of the emerging work in topic maps. Being able to create and change these is one way to manage relationships among objects. Graham Moore did a good paper on using groves for linking to application state. See http://www.empolis.co.uk/products/prod_x2x.asp From the skotos site: "Though we're using the basic ideas of XML, we haven't poured over the XML specs in ultimate detail. We don't actually need to comply to the XML specs. Thus there may well be other things we do in our system that's off-spec." Looking at their file example it wouldn't be hard to do the right thing and make it possible take their file, using XSLT and spit out a 3D object that conforms. If they persist game state for players, and enable modification between episodes (another kimberly bit was that she covers plot types; nice), then the XSLT can use these to initialize a 3D world, SOAP for RPC services, and so on. An important issue for UMEL will be being able to do this kind of thing in a provably standard way, so the light way Skotos treats this issue won't work in the long run. (yes, that's a challenge to the lurkers). It does us not much good other than experience and bangles to create for proprietary languages and implementations. Thanks for the pointer, Jed. Most enjoyable reading. Len http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h -Original Message- From: Jed Hartman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Perhaps Lurker Par has some thoughts about how all this plays out in existing MUDs, such as the groundbreaking work he and his company are doing now at http://www.skotos.net -- I envision this kind of thing eventually being a back-end to interactive stories of the type we're talking about, with a 3D graphics display system in place of text descriptions -- there are a lot of ways in which the problems being solved are different in these two cases, but also, I think, a lot of similarities.)
RE: writing scripts
Brahma is absolute. All others are over a horizon so long we see an eternity and a universe of immortal deities who are yet only an age of the timeless one. Now we just have to figure out if the Ds As inherit implementations or only interfaces. :-) Len http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h -Original Message- From: Rev. Bob 'Bob' Crispen [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, December 01, 2000 7:04 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: writing scripts The voices are telling me that Len said on Thursday, November 30, 2000: God has to intervene without being seen. How does God get them to go where God wants and still maintain an illusion of free will? Devils and angels. Freakin brilliant, Len! Bravo! Now if I can just get the destructor to keep from blowing up on my God object... -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen crispen at hiwaay dot net "His men would follow him anywhere, but only out of morbid curiosity."
RE: writing scripts
Reading an email on the big list... Now that is something I hadn't considered but should be headslap obvious. The operating system security features for user authentication and access privileges can actually be a control in a virtual reality fiction because it depends on roles. Kinda of a warped way to do it, but perfectly doable and exactly how we make access to information and modules configured in enterprise systems. Len http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h
RE: writing scripts
Time to inflate the shoes a bit more ... One has to ask why there are devils and angels in the universe, and of course as we were taught by Milton, they are the side effect of the war in heaven over the creation itself. Devils are angels with a different agenda set by an angel with an agenda. So, one can say, if God is One, indivisible (Brahma in the Hindu myth), then these agents, while immortal from the limited viewpoint of mortals, are really limited to the age of a creation, and in fact, are the product of a creation. (Instances, so to speak with very long lifecycles.) A third class of near immortals also came into being. These are the angels that are the conscientious objectors of the war in heaven. Thinking it all ridiculous, they would not take sides and sat out the war on their own clouds indulging themselves in the pleasures of heaven. Consider them the wildcards in the dualities. In the judgment, these angels were condemned to become the elementals of Earth. Because they did neither good nor evil, they are neither good nor evil, but they are very powerful because other than not being able to reenter heaven, they have the power of to transform themselves and the elements. They are near gods. Yet they are condemned to be part of creation, so must also take on guises when they manifest to mortals. They are in music, in the wind, in the fabric of the mortal world, whatever they want to indulge in. They have free will and God does not constrain them to God's public agenda nor can the devil constrain them to his. They can constrain each other by the hierarchy of their own society. If they take on a human guise, they are sorcerers, warlocks, witches, and so on. Unlike angels and devils who must work with an agenda, the only agenda these beings have is their own indulgence, yet because they actually are woven into the fabric of a creation, they evolve. So, they differentiate, become wicked, become wise, become very individual according to their desire, and that desire is the means by which they are known to each other. They can also do what angels and devils cannot; they can destroy a mortal, interbreed with mortals, and create offspring. They are part of the fabric of creation and so can permanently affect it directly. They live only so long as the part of creation they are in exists. They age slowly but faster than angels and devils who can enter creation but are never part of it, but much more slowly than the mortals. They all know their spells. We call them XSL transforms. They execute when a world transitions into the next state (consider it, episodes divided into scenes. No commercials unless you need the money...). Episodic construction is the easiest way to drive a never-ending story. In case anyone wonders where I get this stuff, it was the exercise of trying to figure out where Samantha, Endora and their race came from originally and how Sam became the only witch to marry a mortal. Call it, PreWitched. ;-) Len http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h
RE: writing scripts
As always, wish I had more time to participate in this discussion... Also as always, I'm inclined to overlay my tabletop-RPG views on this. (Perhaps Lurker Par has some thoughts about how all this plays out in existing MUDs, such as the groundbreaking work he and his company are doing now at http://www.skotos.net -- I envision this kind of thing eventually being a back-end to interactive stories of the type we're talking about, with a 3D graphics display system in place of text descriptions -- there are a lot of ways in which the problems being solved are different in these two cases, but also, I think, a lot of similarities.) In most RPGs, the GM does not -- cannot -- just set a clockwork universe into motion and step back, because someone has to play the part of Len's devils and angels -- non-player characters, inanimate objects, all the incidents and accidents that interfere with or promote character goals. [Um, it's come to my attention recently that many people these days use the term "RPG" to refer to video games in which you go through a sequence of adventures killing everything in your path. I suppose this is a reasonable usage -- until a recent review in Strange Horizons I had no idea that these games had true storylines, and I'm still a bit mystified as to how that works -- but it's not how I use the term; I'm talking about traditional Dungeons Dragons-style roleplaying games, where everything takes place in the players' and GM's imaginations, perhaps aided by pencils and paper and dice.] But there are a lot of different GMing philosophies -- and a lot of different tricks. Some GMs try to come as close to the clockwork universe as possible: they create a detailed world, they create vast hordes of NPCs, and then they do their best to play those NPCs as if they were real people with real goals. Other GMs are trickier, manipulating things from behind the scenes to ensure that things go the way they want, changing motivations and even facts on the fly as long as they're not already known to the player characters. (Think Schrodinger's Cat: if the PCs don't know something, that thing can remain undecided, in limbo, until the PCs collapse the state vector by determining the single true answer.) My usual example -- no time to see if I've said this before here, apologies if I'm repeating myself -- is when the PCs are faced with three doors, and they have to choose one. The trickster/interfering GM can put the adventure behind whichever door the PCs choose -- whereas the clockwork-universe GM has to build three adventures, one for each door. I think there's room for both styles; as long as the players don't catch you changing things behind the scenes, as long as they can maintain suspension of disbelief, it doesn't matter whether the buildings are all facades. (Think that old Star Trek episode, the gunfight at the OK Corral, with the movie-set-style building fronts...) The clockwork universe makes more sense in a computer-based story in some ways, because you don't need a human's intervention to keep it running. On the other hand, in my experience it's less likely to result in a dramatically satisfying story than a universe with a hands-on God who can push things into the paths of best narrative. So perhaps a modification of the devils and angels approach: a puppetmaster God (an AI if possible, but maybe it would have to be one or more humans in the near term) who can push the various entities in the world in various ways. Nudge them in the right direction when they falter, provide rescues from frustrating dead ends if they spend a certain amount of time pounding heads against a wall. Note that MUSHes often have storylines planned by a group of players who more or less run the game -- a multi-headed God, who can more effectively deal with the multitude of players interacting. I gather that Live-Action RPGS (LARPs) also run this way. And speaking of running, must run. --jed Jed Hartman Fiction Editor Strange Horizons http://www.strangehorizons.com/
RE: writing scripts
I've taken the baby steps. For me, and maybe others here, the next steps should be a lot more adventurous. The idea is to support driving a plot forward when in effect maintaining an illusion of free will. I chose that metaphor to illustrate simple concepts of having an author who does not appear in the story. It is the toughest kind of story to write because author bias is what a story is about. The words chosen, the events illustrated, the characters all reveal the author advocacy. Good journalists work like hell to get that out of their reporting so that the judgement of the reader is not impaired by the journalist's intervention in the perception of the facts.One might not get there, but the goal set determines the quality of the work. The kind of world I describe requires some sophisticated but not new computer science techniques. The use of XML is key to persisting and transforming state data that can then be fed back into an otherwise continuous and seamless presentation. Yes, the agent appears or disappears offstage, but that is how point of view works anyway. We trust the world as it is presented to us and because of that, both in real life and in the illusions we maintain, a lot of agent activity is hidden from us. Are you really sure the refrigerator light goes off, do you check the electric meter every day, or do you let the world do as it will and you deal with it as you must? This willingness is at the heart of fiction and 3D worlds are just one more medium for presenting that. I use the devil/angel metaphor because while it is a clean duality, in actual use, it can become very devious. If the devil can read the angel's intent, then "assuming a pleasing shape" is a simple task. If I were to set this sort of thing up as a multiplayer, I would allow the players to take on the devil/angel roles, without revealing to others that they have done so, then watch the strategies they evolve for manipulating the mortal characters. I might even allow the Lord of the Game to sometimes unbeknownst to the superbeing characters, take on the guise of the mortal for a triple-cross strategy. What we are playing with is the plasticity of the worlds we create and our skill at divining and using the intent of the other players for them or against them in the context of a larger world strategy set up by the author. The unexepectedness we seek, the shaping by uncertainty, is a by-product of real time interaction and enabling the world to be shaped (side effects) by these interactions, and that change in the environment to then shape the actions of the players, thus achieving a loosely coupled feedback system. "The faith of each believer, Indian Prince, conforms itself to what he truly is. Where thou shalt see a worshipper, that one to what he worships lives assimilate." - Krishna to Arjuna - The Gita A story is easy to do and in IrishSpace, we demonstrated simple but quite *affective* ways to present one. We made the text drive the emotions with the native Irish narrators voices perfectly conveying that intent. The animation while impressive, was playing a secondary role in plot driving. The intent of the author is emblazoned like an LA billboard. So, this is not much of a leap although it was a very big challenge. The step beyond that should use the devices of the medium more actively. We knew it but it wasn't realizable when IS was done for various reasons (the tech wasn't up to it yet, the time was too short, the talent too raw in many cases, and we were spinning it out of our navels so to speak). To get beyond the story, we have to re-dimensionalize the very flat linearity of plot and enable multi-dimensional plot, but if we are to entertain beyond a simple shoot-em game, or find the treasure, or uncover the past mystery, then we must enable agents that interact according to boundaries set by the author of the world, then step back and watch. Those who say they want to delve into VR fiction should step back and ask themselves if they really want to innovate in a new medium, or replicate the old ones. While there is nothing wrong with that, it is a transposition not innovation. What some want to describe to themselvs as a new fiction, is really just movie making in 3D, and for that, turn on the TV on Saturday morning and you can find lots of examples. It isn't a giant step to do non-linear fiction, but it is a completely different medium, toolset, technique, and role for the author, more a game design than a short story. It is hard to give up the role of Lord Of The Story. Be honest about that. IrishSpace was "Our Town" brought to VRML: an illustrated narrative + a little interactivity, not an innovation, but a proof we could do it online, we could build complex long form narratives, and we could get it to work in a P200 32mb, just sorta barely. It also showed, unfortunately, just
RE: writing scripts
Manu Len would be more honorific. :-) We should be looking at how to create and animate agents in multiplayer worlds using XML/XSLT tech. It is just a vocabulary design task. X3D gives us the hard part. The rest is a set of vocabularies for character motivation which can be used to set expressions, tones, etc. Len http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h -Original Message- From: Sandy Ressler [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2000 6:28 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: writing scripts Len now this is one helluva description you got here...or should I say Lord Len ;-)
Re: writing scripts
The voices are telling me that Len said on Thursday, November 30, 2000: God has to intervene without being seen. How does God get them to go where God wants and still maintain an illusion of free will? Devils and angels. Freakin brilliant, Len! Bravo! Now if I can just get the destructor to keep from blowing up on my God object... -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen crispen at hiwaay dot net "His men would follow him anywhere, but only out of morbid curiosity."
RE: writing scripts
Close. Let's explore the illusion management thing. Exploring a world set up with devices is part of the answer, but it is still a bit too static and predictable. Let's look at how God does it (ok, inflate your shoes, Bozos!). Let's say God does what some theologians think and sets up the universe, then walks away. It is awfully difficult to make a story where all of the characters have free will. Let's pretend for the moment that problems of memory management, loading and unloading objects, are behind us. Free will is a problem. The god-endowed agent, ostensibly a user with free will, gets to go where they want to. Since they will not necessarily do anything interesting or entertaining for God, God has to intervene without being seen. How does God get them to go where God wants and still maintain an illusion of free will? Devils and angels. Now despite what they wear in the nether or upper regions, on Earth, they have to look like something that belongs there or they break the illusion. Mind you, an environment can be normal or phantasmagoric, but unless you make it consistent, the illusion falls apart and like Daffy Duck in the cartoon, you find out about Bugs. So the first part of illusion maintenance is a consistent world. If time goes forward, time always goes forward. If there are no dragons, there are no dragons. God sets it up and lets it run. However, to keep it directed, God puts in Devils and angels... God cannot intervene, no deus ex machinas, but God makes the devils and angels purposeful and they can get in and out of the world at will. Devils try to keep a character from getting to the goal set by God. Angels try to keep a character on track. Both try to undo the work of the other. All the time. Spy vs Spy. So we need a world where: 1. Devils and angels can watch the estate of mortals. 2. Devils and angels can plan. 3. Devils and angels can insert themselves into the scene and can even set up the scene (stage offline) but cannot do anything outside of the rules God sets up. 4. Devils can set up a mortal to do themselves in and angels can set up a mortal to save themselves, but neither can kill or save a mortal directly. Free will, or the illusion of free will, is the prime directive, so to speak. The idea of course, is active agents, feedback and the ability to prestage JIT environments. The world creator has to define a consistent world and actually has to create a hierarchy if you will of such agents with goal seeking agendas. How complex you can get depends on your imagination, and you may have to do some load balancing to figure out just how often an angel or devil can appear and in what guises. They should always have guises because they are actually just abstractions of dualities. By maintaining a complete set of all the dualities, you can make sure that sequences and parallel events have inputs which adjust intensities of events. Guises can be anything from another character to a banana peel. Consider the way SMIL creates presentations and ask yourself what you could do if you could use a language like XSLT to create objects offline, then insert them into the event sets dynamically. Use XML to persist states the same way coarse transaction systems persist states and for the same reason. State maintenance using a means that enables you to send update grams to lots of machines is what you want in case you want to play this with more than one player. Also, remember that you are not allowed to rollback a transaction; you can apply a mediating next transaction and that is where the devils and angels come in. If you really want to get wild, devils and angels can not only read the mortal, they can read each other and play tit for tat. Again, you have to load balance so you will need some restrictions on what they can do to each other and that, most likely means that in accordance with the rules of illusion maintenance, they are subject to the rules of the guise they use. Len http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h -Original Message- From: Niclas Olofsson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] I agree with len here. One thing that popped up in my mind is this old saying that "What if we had all the money in the world, all the time, and all the developers. What kind of software couldn't we build then?"
Re: writing scripts
Len now this is one helluva description you got here...or should I say Lord Len ;-) Sandy "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" wrote: Close. Let's explore the illusion management thing. Exploring a world set up with devices is part of the answer, but it is still a bit too static and predictable. Let's look at how God does it (ok, inflate your shoes, Bozos!). Let's say God does what some theologians think and sets up the universe, then walks away. It snip -- .. Sandy Ressler About.com Guide to Web3D http://web3d.about.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] .. Sign up for my free newsletter at: http://web3d.about.com/library/blnews.htm ..
RE: writing scripts
You write it based on observable behavior and events. You can create internal states easily using node transitions. It is not hard to write it; it is a matter of working out how to present it. Don't write stories; create environments and shaping forces on characters. The difficulty is in getting the author out of the story as an active agent. You should probably abandon the terminology of "story" with all of its inherent linear baggage of monaural time and look at sequencing and event-based selection. The essence of non-linearity in all domains is feedback. Explore what non-linearity is: a gap or chasm in a plot which means unpredictable outcomes. How do you incorporate uncertainty that even the author cannot dismiss? As for VR, the bigger problems are the technical issues of resource management, latency, and hiding devices from the user, and by that, I don't mean simply making them invisible to the eye, but invisible to the experience. Illusion maintenance is hard work. Len http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h -Original Message- From: Miriam English [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, November 29, 2000 6:48 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: writing scripts I have been thinking about how best to script a 3d story. I have for some time enjoyed reading scripts and have often thought how writing 3d story would differ from writing a standard film script. I started writing a story a couple of years ago with the intention of making it as a work of VR Fiction (gotta find a less clumsy name than that). I began writing it as if it was a short story. That kinda worked, but it is hard to keep in the mode of writing it for VR; I found it too easy to drift back into normal writing habits, like mentioning what is going on in someone's head, and you can't show people's thoughts in VR easily. So I figured I need to adopt some format that keeps me restricted to what can be shown in VR. I am rewriting it as if I was writing a film script. The problem is that VR is different to film, even though this is a pretty standard film-like story with a ghostly, non-interactive viewer. (We need a name for that too.) Actually, writing it as a script seems to be working fairly well so far... I doubt anyone else has come up with any ways to write for VR Fiction... it is too early yet... but does anybody have any ideas that can help? Even with a fairly standard linear non-interactive format. (We really do need names for this stuff.) I guess ways to do this will just happen as people actually create it. Of course the really hard stuff is the interactive, non-linear formats. Do you have any way of approaching this stuff Paul? Or do you just do it as it occurs to you in a meandering fashion? (That is how I do many of my drawings... and many of my stories too.) [sigh] Cheers, - Miriam
