[MUD-Dev] Parlez vous NPC?

[Matt Chatterley]

On Fri, 20 Mar 1998, Vadim Tkachenko wrote:
> Matt Chatterley wrote:
> 
> [skipped]
> 
> Well, it's said that everything new is long forgotten old - do you still
> remember Eliza and Julia robot and derivatives?

Yeah. My original inspiration in this fashion grew from a base in such
things (and also things such as the infamous 'psychiatrist' in EMACS, and
so forth), which I toyed with again (as one does) for a few minutes while
bored. Then I went back to sketching out ideas for a system ala Monkey
Island for communication with NPCs. At this point, something went *bing*
and I scribbled notes describing about half of this stuff. It's a new
application of old ideas, in many, many ways.
 
[Snip]

> > giving it three statements to deal with. Next we need to remove words
> > which are of no value to us (for instance 'and', 'the', 'a' and so forth),
> > leaving us with (writing from the NPCs point of view):
> > 
> > 1. (directed at me) think about weather (question)
> 
> Those robots usually replace any references to ... forgot the English
> term for that (me, you, we, they; mine, my, your[s], his, her - what are
> the names for these two groups?) with the opposite words, so the
> response is likely to be
>
>   - What makes you think that I think about the weather?

Yeah. This is why one notion which I wanted to introduce was handling of
at whom a statement appeared to be directed, so that vaguely sensible
personal responses can be formulated. I was very worried about the system
getting confused in this respect, but it actually seems quite robust
(ignoring the obvious case of a player deliberately trying to confuse it).
 
> > 2. (directed at <player>) snow miserable (statement)
> > 3. (directed at me) about (question)
> > 
> > This incidentally shows up one flaw in the system - simple statement
> > portions (such as #3 above), are mangled very badly and may no longer be
> > useful.
> 
> One of implementations I've seen, if exhausted the pattern analysis,
> goes up the stack of saved pattern keywords and tries to restart the
> conversation on the topic on the top of stack, like:
> 
>   - I don't know what to tell you about this, let's better talk about
> the
>     weather.
> 
> [skipped]

Heh, very cute. I'd probably handle this by having 'topics' of
conversation settable in the NPC (by its location, race, and by the
creator of said individual), so that it will begin to talk about something
it knows about (for instance, it might have information about a quest that
it will begin to discuss).
 
> > There are still a thousand and one problems which I have deliberately not
> > described (I wanted to put across the system outline in a basic fashion,
> > plus I'm very tired). The obvious problems are actually amongst the hard
> > ones to solve, and I await your blowtorches. :)
> 
> Can I say that all you use boils down to the rewriting grammars, too?

Never said it was perfect. ;) The results so far have been interesting
(some very good ones, and some complete disasters), but its fun to play
with. :)

--
Regards,
	-Matt Chatterley
Spod: http://user.super.net.uk/~neddy/spod/spod.html