Saturday 31 October 2015

A Sneak Preview

Here are a few of the topics coming up in this blog:

Conversation

... conversation parsing; creating dialog content; making the input manageable.

Autonomous NPCs

... modelling a human being; motivation, personality and emotions.

Drama management

... dynamic story generation; plot building blocks; player freedom.

Interactivity

... extending the parser; how much to simulate; emergence and unexpected solutions.

Artificial Intelligence

... knowledge representation; AI techniques for IF.

It would take a thesis (or more) to do justice to each of these topics, and I’m no expert on any of them, so I hope to learn a lot on the way.

There is nothing particularly wrong with the current state of IF, but it’s fun to explore what might be possible in the future and what it would take to get there.

Friday 23 October 2015

Conversation and Reasoning

Welcome! Please read the introduction to get an idea of where this blog is coming from. You might also want to start from the second post, a preview of what is coming up.

To begin with, a thought provoking quote:

“Subtle interactions such as conversations are still out of reach of autonomous AI; games rely on clever scripting or cutscenes to get that across. If we as a field will master these types of interactions, more parts of the game can be interactive, and possibly whole new game genres may become feasible.”

– Remco Straatman in The Future of AI in Games (2010)

So what would it take to allow free form conversation in a text based game? More after the break.