[Hajo]

Hi,

once I tried to make a space exploration game. I had a generator to create a whole galaxy of solar systems, all very nice - but then I hit the problem: scripting NPC dialogs for several 100.000 NPCs is impossible.

Reusing the same dialogs all over is boring.

Basically there are only few NPC types. Traders, public officers, barkeepers ... and finally some unimportant random people to fill the towns.

I'm looking for suggestions how to create non-repetitive dialogs for the NPCs types. I don't expect algorithmically (randomly?) generated dialogs to be very high quality, I just look for something that doesn't appall the players too much.

Any ideas?

[Mandrake]

The easist way to do it is to create a generic sentance structure for each character "type" and replace a few random words here and there. I mean, how many different things is a trader going to say? One way to trip up the character (and to spice up the game a bit) would be to also allow for random ancedotes from the traders life. This could add a bit a of background, but be much more work on your behalf. It would also have to be used rarely or else teh ancedotes would get repetitive. Mayb one out of every 100 times you talk to a trader he will throw in a random daily ancedote (like, "I wish I was at home with my wife and kids instead of trolling across the universe selling junk to people like you", or "How's the space weather outside? Cold and empty?"...heh, of course yours would be a bit more serious).

The idea for a generic sentance structure would be like this:

"%greeting, We have a %object on sale today. %closure"

And then it would randomly replace %greeting with "Hello", or "How are you?", etc etc. %object could be replaced with "Heal potion", "Space Slave Oil", etc etc, and closre could be "So what would you like to buy today?" or "Can I help you".

You could then have four or five sentance structures that it randomly picks from and randomly inserts words into. This wouldn't be perfect, but not completely repetitive either.
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[Bjorn]

Well, one thing I'd like to say about this is that when you somehow manage to produce interesting things to say by NPCs at random, you'll want to make it so that the player can't learn all there is to your system by just talking to a single character. You'll have to do something to make each character only so interesting so that it'll still be interesting to talk to another one.

Other than that, there's probably going to be a limited amount of topics the player can ask an NPC about. I'd suggest listing these and putting down related useful knowledge and how it can be obtained from your generated universe.

Finally, when you have determined what somebody will talk about, you'll have to put the information into sentences. There's grammar and sentence structure to worry about here, but also speaking style. Again, you'll want a certain character to keep to its talking style, possibly based on the region it's from.

I probably haven't said anything you didn't know already, but I tried to give a description of the problems involved. I'm interested in this matter as well, only in the sense of a regular fantasy world instead of a universe.

[Hajo]

One thing I'd link to the dialogs is the non-combat AI. My NPCs have an idea if they are hungry, tired, dirty, want to go learning/training, want to meet other NPC.

I think this should be a basis to create simple smalltalk. Hungry -> talk about eating, maybe ask where to find a restaurant? Unfortunatley my ideas are much too blurry to code them.

The other idea was to keep a history of world events. E.g. the players ship was attacked by space pirates -> local news reports it, and the NPCs will say things related to latest space pirate activities?

It sounds easy, but I didn't really found a way to code it. The problem is the visibility of events. A NPC should not talk about events he can't know about.

Mandrake, your sentance template idea should at least solve the worst problems. I can use it immediately. Thank you!

[Mandrake]

No problem. Well, that other idea will be a bit tricky when randomly generating characters (giving them world knowledge)...but could be be approximated by using regions of knowledge for an NPC and each action that the player has also has fame factor. Now, when the player performs X action, it would use a message board style system, which is basically a que of actions that could be done in either a class or a struct. example in psudeo code:

[Mandrake]

I just read about your H-world project just now, and I must admit it's pretty interesting from an AI-random world point of view. Very nifty. If you need help, just ask. I can't do anything too time consuming, but I can code some snippets or just suggest solutions to problems.
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[Rainer Deyke]

In games with a reasonable number of npcs (less than 100), the player will talk to every one of them, and expect different dialogue from every one of them. In a game with 100000 npc, this is obviously ridiculous, so the question is, what purpose do the npcs serve? Why would the player want to talk to them?

I think randomized dialogue is probably not the right approach here, as it will lead to the player either ignoring your npcs (wasting all of your hard work) or brute force attempts to see every line of dialogue (wasting the player's time). If the npcs have nothing important to say, it would be better if the player can't talk to them at all.

[Mandrake]

Actually, if you would read teh kind of game he's trying to create you would see that it makes sense. He's not creating a console-style RPG with heavy NPC-based plot interaction, but more of the older exploration based RPG's (with an emphasis on random world creation). It makes sense. He is trying to create a random persistant world with a very high level of interaction between player and world and trying to create a persistant realistic world where NPC's get hungry and sleepy and enemies can move in packs or alone.
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[Rainer Deyke]

I've played a fair number of "random world" rpgs. (I wouldn't call them exploration based, since exploration is only interesting when you find designed content, not random generic dungeons.) I've never found the npc dialogue in them to be interesting, even when it wasn't randomized, but especially when it was. If an npc doesn't have something interesting to say, it is better if he doesn't say anything than if he gives the player more useless information to process.

[Mandrake]

Still, it's an interesting idea programming wise.
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[white_door]

An example of such is in morrowind. It used the word topic conversation system, where you could pick words and the npc would respond. This works fine for most generic npcs.. my only problem was it was frustraiting dealing with important plot characters where they would still say the same old things.

Personally I would give all the npcs generic titles ("Angry Scientist", "White Chick", ... etc) except for important and interesting ones in which I would give unique names and custom dialog. This comes down to what you want to do. For the generic npcs, maybe one could have an bank of information about their planet and area, and the game could choice which types of topics they would discuss based on their personality, race, professian, wealth level, status, ..etc.. Hopefully there would be enough mix and matchs that it would take conversations with a wide number of different npcs before you started to get bored with total repeats.

[LeoDraco]

You might want to look into Markov Chains; with a sufficient database of sample data, they can produce interesting, amusing, and (at times) grammatically correct sentences in the style of the original data.

I have an example program here; while it really isn't as polished as it could be, and lacks a sufficient amount of sample data to do anything overly fantastic, it does get the point across.
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"...LeoDraco is a pompus git..." -- Mandrake

[Mandrake]

two years ago I wrote a scripted chaos engine, which could create random text from an input text and used lua to script it. It was supposed to be a tool for experimental novelists I knew. It included a markhov chain algorythm.

But, I don't think it would work quite right- heh. It's still very gibberish sounding, just a bit more grammatically correct, and can actually become repetitve after awhile.

I was going to use a markhov chain algorythm for a character in one my games who was insane, using Dubliners and Alice: Through the Looking Glass as input for the text.
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"Well, last time I flicked on a lighter, I'm pretty sure I didn't create a black hole."-
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http://pauljessup.com

[biggerUniverse]

[Hajo]