Trolling around the excite demo that Sandy mentioned in
the about.com posts, the AI that fool anyone anytime
seems to be a long way off. Thinking about this lately
as adjuncts to what is available in Cybertown, I had
been wondering about building self-regulating worlds
that used local conditions to push the user around a
little when they act up, go out of bounds, whatever. It
seems to me that all of the pieces are available, but
we have yet to really define what the features of the
lit we are talking about are.
It is reasonably straightforward
(conceptually) to set up a world in which space takes
the place of time, although that is meaningless. Time
is time. It doesn't matter. The linerarity or non-linearity of
a story is a linearity of events, not time. It convenient
for the sake of drama to break up space. Space is an
organizational element insofar as certain spaces
can be said to parenthesize the types of events that
take place, eg, at a hot dog stand, one buysHotdogs.
Even if conversation about the weather takes place,
that is a method of the StoryWorldSpace which might
be overridden locally but otherwise, is not peculiar
to HotDogStandSpace. It may be that local spaces
have hotTopics (Does everyone REALLY want to
be an Oscar Meyer Wiener?)
Posit: a non-linear story is one
in which events can be reordered and by that, any
order dependent conditions change state. I've said
before that people keep looking for abstractions here
which may not be all that relevant, that
actually, it is the controls that are important and
fundamentally, for say H-anim characters, those
are already there (what can you route to). Controls
let you execute a storyline, a script, and script is
the key word.
A story line is a set of messages sent to a story world
to initiate events. That is all.
A story world of any kind I think would need:
o H-anim characters with local behaviors. Don't
send a behavior to the character; send the command
for that characer plus any required variables, eg, a story
protocol.
o Of course, it is just an API for talking to the world
and any characters or active agents in the world to
change states
After that, you can use any means inside the world
to script as complicated a behavior as you can manage.
One thing to consider is using XML as the format for
the messages you send. It would be cool if out of the
X3D work we also got a means to bind external XML
data to the world. It would be useful for resetting
characters, persisting story state, communicating
among different browsers, etc. So an API, a set
of message types (eg, DNA like XML), and so forth.
I can't think of many technical barriers to building
that with VRML97 other than the problems of
persistence. Otherwise, as long as one can
live with the performance, a decent database and
VRML Automation would do most of this. If you want
to do it multi-player, you need chat as well.
If you watch things like the morphBattles going on
in cybertown, they are the beginnings of long running
events that lots of people get involved in. Yes, they
are in some ways like a game, but they also generate a
scenario played out over time by some willing and
accidental players.
Len Bullard
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jed Hartman [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2000 12:51 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Neverwinter Nights?
>
>
> Hi, folks. Anyone heard anything about Neverwinter Nights?
> (http://www.neverwinternights.com/). Looks to me like yet another
> step (in yet another direction) on the long road we're traveling --
> when released, it'll be a 3D D&D game, which can be played by a
> single player at home but can also be played by multiple players over
> the network. The thing that makes it better than the multiplayer
> killfest games out there is that it allows the option of having a
> "DungeonMaster" (DM), a person who guides the action, sets up the
> world, and can talk through the mouths of the NPCs. It looks to me
> like it'll end up being essentially two kinds of games, neither of
> which is quite what we're looking for:
>
> 1. Hack-and-slash unmoderated killfests, no storyline or
> characterization.
>
> 2. Online roleplaying games, with the computer as a GMing tool.
> Kind of like Niven & Barnes' _Dream Park_ only online.
>
> The part of the site that gives me hope for the game is this line:
>
> >We want to challenge you, as DM, to
> >have a deep emotional impact on your players.
>
> Anyway, we clearly haven't Arrived yet, but the only missing step
> here is replacing the human DM with a computer program. And for that
> we only need true AI. No problem! :)
>
> --jed
