[MUD-Dev] believable NPCs (was Natural Language Generation)

[Sam Mason]

J C Lawrence wrote:

> I'm not convinced.

I'll second that; NLP/NLG is a very difficult problem and isn't
likely to be solved any time soon - as much as I would like it to
be!

> Many text MUDs had two modes: long descriptions and short
> descriptions.  The standard practice was for players to turn on
> long descriptions only when exploring a new area, but to otherwise
> play with the faster and more efficient short descriptions (even
> if they were on fast connections).

One possible, and probably easier to implement, idea I've just had;
is to use something similar to the paper Robert Zubek just posted,
to recognise how the player is playing the game and customise the
world for their current style.

If they're just running around madly, then it's a safe bet that you
can start missing NPCs out of the room descriptions; if the player,
on the other hand, is spending longer in each room and looking at
more of the items in the room, it may be prudent to display more
complete descriptions by default.

I would (naively, as I've never used anything like them before)
guess that the idea of using POMDPs would easily generalise to
things like general user input.  In fact, I would guess it would be
easier than trying to parse free form text, as you would at least
know exactly what the commands where meant to do in the game.

Just an idea,
  Sam Mason
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