[MUD-Dev] Newbies

[David Bennett]

On 2/25/00, at 12:47 AM, MichelleThompson wrote: 

>Nod those are standard, programmable scripts that you can taylor to a mob.

>Most codebases have them.    Generally to introduce an interesting
personality 
>though, they would have to be quite lengthy.  Why not have base scripts
for
>certain personalities.  The personality scripts would handle how a
personality
>type would react to a large number of situtations, based on what players
say or
>do.  After assigning someone a basic personality you could add the type of
>progs you mentioned above to make the mob an individual.   That way they
could
>react in a large variety of ways instead of just several.  You could even 
>assign a basic personality type to fodder mobs with very little overhead.

Scripts are still too simple.  They don't allow for complicated reactions
or for tied together reactions very well.  A nicer (and still quite simple)
method of dealing with this instead is to add a system of goals to your
npcs.  Goals are things that the npc wants to do, they can be anything from
getting drunk, to trying to get rich or whatever.  The goal is fairly
abstract so it doesn't need to fit into a real goal definition, for instead
being annoyed could be a goal, as could being scared.  Goals then fire off
reactions when certain events are called, the reactions are ordered, so the
highest reaction happens first and so on.  This allows for things as simple
as responding to says and emotions, to much more complicated
inter-reactions for dealing with combat responses and so on.

I got this idea somewhat from the OZ project, an interactive story project.
 They talk about how you can make an npc shallow in terms of how it reacts
and yet it seems more inteligent than it is, just because it does actually
react...  If you look for the OZ project, it has a longer description of
this process.

I wrote an article on this for Imaginary Realities a while ago too...:
http://imaginaryrealities.imaginary.com/volume2/issue1/npc.html

Good luck!
David.



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