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

[Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com]

From: Malcolm W. Tester II

> I'm not sold on how far I should take world persistence.  Should
> they remember until the next reboot or crash?  Should they
> remember real-time for a month, several months, forever?  It
> depends on whether the mud in general works the same way.  For my
> ideas, world persistence is a catch 22. I need it for shops,
> economy, etc.  However, for quests, I would have to write much
> more content.  If you take a mish mash of the two, it could work
> rather well, but I would have to let go of realism and hold more
> to fun, enjoyment, etc.

Perhaps one way to address this is to have npcs die periodically and
be replaced with their offspring. That would allow pruning of
persisted information, and you could use a more basic faction system
to pass general affection levels etc. down to their offspring.

One would have to couple this with an automated quest system though
otherwise each time you kill a quest giving npc, you've just blown
up some design effort.

Dan
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