[LeoDraco]

[Rainer Deyke]

Re: chatbot: I want a menu-driven conversation system. No, I need a menu-driven conversation system. I'm not going to play "guess the keyword" , much less "guess the key sentence". It's not just completely unrealistic, it's also no fun at all.

Re: quest system: That sounds a bit... restrictive. I do hope you won't require the player to explicitly pick a quest from a list. One thing I liked about older rpgs is that quests were completely implicit - you could figure out cool things to do and do them yourself without having the computer guide your every step. Figuring out what can be done was often as fun and challenging as actually doing it.

I also think I should be allowed to claim stewardship of the Hearthstone family but killing off all my rivals. That might be an extremely difficult task, perhaps even impossible, but I should at least be allowed to try.

[Guest]

Now that you mention it....yes...somthing along those lines, but with a lot more freedom in the choices you can make, possible outcomes, and the extend to which external influences determines these outcomes. Given a base storyline, and assuming that the player interacts with the storyline in some way, a storyline altering result should occur which shouldnt be determined by only the players action and its pre-programmed counterpart result, but by the current situation in the world, past actions, the players current situation, and a degree of randomness. Its kinda hard to explain but i think you get the idea...

[dak246]

I figured it was about time i registered. Im the one who started this thread. Anyywayy..

The above was in reply to pumpkin heads response.

[Jihgfed Pumpkinhead]

[dak246]

Yes. For example the npc says somthing one day. The next day you walk into a noble lords estate and kill him with a war hammer. The day after that you go back to talk to this npc, who would now reply much diffrently. However if the npc in question is a peasant of some other race and lives in an area far away from that controlled by the now dead noble lord, they shouldnt reply any diffrently, because its not within the scope of their daily lives.

Now for a more theoretical and complicated example. You've been playing for hours and you happen to stumble upon a traveler who tells you about his quest to find some kind of prized scroll thats lost in an elven forest. You decide to find this scroll with hopes of either being able to utilize the information it contains or to sell it to a merchant. Now lets go back in time for a second. Suppose the noble lord from the example above was a known enemy of a tribe a dwarves that live to the north of his lands. You travel there for no real reason other than to explore, when you decide to fight a random person. You kill the person and think nothing of it. It just so happens that the person you killed was an important dwarf. As retaliation the dwarves send an assassin to waste a few humans. It just so happens that one of these human victims is a traveler, on his way to find a lost eleven scroll. Now besides the fact that the tensions between the dwarves and humans can spawn its own storyline, a few hours later when you wouldve come across the traveler, you dont, because hes dead. Now the storyline you're following is much diffrent, without your evening knowing. This adds randomness to the quest you're on, but its randomness that is based off of your actions and the actions of other people in the world.

This isnt too hard to program since i have most of the framework for the npc AI already done...the only thing i havent worked out yet is how to control communication between npcs. My idea for this is to make it so that when an npc decides to talk with another npc, its initiates a sequence of animations that look like a conversation is going on, but all that is really happening is a quick exchange of what each npc "knows" at the current moment. I think this is also an interesting way of being able to spread news throughout an area. But this is in the prototyping phase yet.

[Rainer Deyke]

[Mister.Frosty]

Most of the older (ca. Ultima IV) RPGs used "chat-bot" style dialogue interfaces. These, as has rightly been noted, tended to degenerate into "guess the keyword," since even a fairly well-conceived system has a way of degenerating into that. A common workaround was to highlight words that could be asked about further (e.g., "You really should speak to the KING about the DEMONS that have been ravaging our COUNTRY." "Our COUNTRY is a fine land, but its once happy people have been rendered disconsolate by the endless DEMON attacks that are coming from the NORTHLANDS." Etc., etc.).

This resolution merely accentuated the absurdity of the sytem, though, rather than correcting it. By making it clear that you were not in control of the dialogue, but rather were hunting for the concepts to which an NPC could respond, the "resolution" accelerated the end of the system.

In one case, there was an interesting intervening step -- I only saw it once on a NES game whose name I cannot recall -- where when you got a highlighted word, you would then have that word on a list of topics you could ask NPCs about. So at the start of the game, all you had were NAME, JOB, SITUATION (name and job were two classic things you could ask about in the "chatbot" model), but your list would grow to include, say, KING, DEMON, NORTHLANDS, etc.

This created its own absurdity -- you would simply ask every NPC you met about every item on the list, receiving, "I cannot tell you anything about that" to 95% of your queries.

The resolution was to have dialogue trees, in which you actually chose from complete sentences that were keyed to the NPC. This became the model for all of the later Ultima games and for all of the later AD&D games (following Dark Sun: Shattered Lands). It now is pretty much the established PC model.

The argument is that dialogue trees distance the player from the character, because when you typed in, "KING" you could imagine your character saying, "Tell me who the goddamn King is before I slit your scrawny peasant throat!" rather than, "Good sir peasant, please could you tell me of this noble King who rules over this fair land?"

I've never bought into this school -- which, on the console, generally advocates the silent hero. I think players never really identify with their protagonist in RPGs, at least not in a way that is interfered with by dialogue trees.

One novel solution to the problem was put forth in Pool of Radiance II: Ruins of Myth Drannor, in which you had indirect discourse in the dialogue trees (e.g., "Ask about king") rather than direct. You can try the game out for yourself -- most people wound up feeling that you simply never got attached to your characters at all, whether as extensions of your self or as friends whose quest you guided.

The second argument is that dialogue trees have created an enormous slow-down in gameplay, because just as in the days of the List, a player must pursue every branch to its twiggy end, to make sure she's not missing a quest or a plot point. The more verbose the Q&A, the more time consumptive dialogue becomes.

My general feeling is that this criticism carries some weight in the proper context. Games that are action-driven (or "gameplay" driven) such as Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights really do seem to bog down in the mediocre, lengthy dialogue. Games that are story-driven, of course, benefit hugely from good dialogue. The dialogue made PS:T my favorite RPG of all time.

Given that you seem fairly articulate and interested in writing, I think the best resolution is the use of dialogue trees.

This is a lengthy answer that could have been summarized as: "Yes, people used chat-bot/Eliza dialogue, without much success."

[Mister.Frosty]

(Addendum)

For two similar games that each chose different ways of resolving dialogue (direct vs. indirect discourse), compare Starflight I & II with Star Control II & III.

[Bjorn]

[white_door]

In response to your original post, I don't believe the chat-bot style interface has been done at all yet. There are a few older games and interactive fictions that had the player type out text to the computer, but with a few exceptions I felt the results were not, in my opinion, overally well done. None of these had any form of AI behind the input. A true chat-bot system would use some kind of system to figure out the content from the words given using some form of nature language processing, and give reasonable responses to both queries and statements. A simple keyword search doesn't even come close to this. In fact to state a keyword search is a form of chat-bot style dialog is plain silly.

Didn't all or most of the Ultimas used the keyword system? I don't think it was ever meant to be anything else. At least ultima 4 & 5 gave you the keywords to type. It was the same as its more modern child, ultima 7 only you clicked on the keyword instead of typing it. Morrowind mildly interesting in that it too had the keyword system, only gave you a lot of common keywords that every person seemed to know. Unfortunately for the most part they replied the same way.

Concerning 'modern' rpgs: all of the Baldur's Gate/Neverwinter Nights/P:t games have used the conversation interfaces straight from the old point and click adventure games. These can work well in my opinion, but I'm interested in the possiblities that could be done with a chat-bot style.

Sure even modern chat-bots that have massive databases to power them aren't perfect.. but I'll always remember my first conversation with A.L.I.C.E. It seemed to me that, for a moment, I might be talking with a real person.. I didn't try to 'test' it, but I just had a nice informal chat. Later I did 'test' it and found it to be less than human.. but I think the possibilities are still interesting to say the least.

[Bjorn]

Ok, I've split away the post that were mostly not related to this discussion, they can be found in the offtopic section over here. No hard feelings, ok? Sand over it.