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[antymattar]

Hello. I just came up with an awesome mood system.

 The idea is that you have 8 possible expressions that are either turned on or of.

Here is an example(undercrossed means that it`s on):

Mood:insane
------------------------------------
happy       |confused
saddened |straigtforward
------------------------------------
calm          |Confident
excited      |Discouriged
------------------------------------

Turning one or more of any two expressions in any of the four sections on or off changes the overall mood of the person. I`m pretty shore that this system can make practically any mood possible.

Any ideas? suggestions?

[Theophilus]

WHat would the formula for a jealous mood be?

[tergem]

My guess is

Saddened, Straight forward, Excited, Discouraged.

[PowRTocH]

I think it would be better to base it off something well studied, like Paul Ekman's list of basic emotions which is in turn used by Scott McCloud in his Making Comics. Scott McCloud uses the 'outdated' version, which is nice by virtue of its simplicity despite lacking completeness.

I think specifically the happy/saddened distinction does not provide enough room to effectively model many negative emotions.

But anyways I've been interested in the fluid modelling of emotions as a game mechanic and this topic is a nice step in that direction.

[antymattar]

The mood only effects the actions of the person. All the wants(like gelousy) are kept somwhere else.

The persons actions are determined, however, by what they know. That would require a whole different system.

[mirosurabu]

Jealousy requires direction (jealous "AT") so it might not be considered a mood.

But what about anger and anxiety? How would you derive these form these statistics?

[antymattar]

Remmember that any sections two options can be simultaneously on or off.

Anger is symple(big text means on)

Code:

---------------------------
happy      |optional:confused
SADDENED   |optional:straightforward
---------------------------
calm       |CONFIDENT
EXSCITED   |DISCOURAGED
---------------------------

the confident tag means that the person is confident about himself, therefor more capable of justifying himself for doing any stupid actions. Rage.
Discouraged stands for the person being negatively opressed by his own world.

Anxiety would be(Im guessing that means that the person is expectiong something)

Code:

---------------------------
HAPPY      |CONFUSED
saddened   |straightforward
---------------------------
calm       |straightforward
EXSCITED   |discouraged
---------------------------

Here we can see that the lower right options(those that effect the persons actions in a particular friendly/hostrile/neutral way) are all turned off. The person is excited and happy yet confused. To get Awe, all you have to do is turn of happyness. Then the person is just confused and excited. You might just want to turn everything besides confusion off just to make the person dumbstruck(in a sort of silly way).

[gimymblert]

You may check your model with those, they are pretty similar:

The ortony model is my preferred model, but it is contextual and oriented


The russel model is close to yours:


But he is not alone, many model are similar.


which can be summed up by:

expending on those model you can have a fine mixing of emotion:


But yeah you cover almost all emotions.
Your axis are:

POWER (confidence, discourage)
EXCITATION (excitation, calm)
DISPOSITION (happy, sad)
FOCUS (confuse, straightforward)

[antymattar]

I had no idea that there were som many other models like mine. That is both cool and stupid at the same time. Sweet because I can now say that I single handedly cam across something that was kind of already invented but I didn't know about it. But stupid because this is like my number 100 invention that has already been invented. But not completely. Most of those models were only similar to mine.

Yeah. Thanks.

[gimymblert]

I wonder what you will use this for? I mean how it translate into a gameplay experience.

[antymattar]

My orriginal idea for a game that involved this was so:

Two countries are gathering the finest minds on earth to ensure their future existence on the planet because the lack of resources on their puny planet is causing a major war. So, the player gets to choose 10 scientists from the world with different skills(I have a list of 15+) and different personalities to design, prototype and finish a project(there are many types of projects) weather it be the metatomic bomb or the thermoquantom energy generator. You must do all of this before the opposite team of scientists creates their megaproject. You get indications of what they are doing because they, just like you, aquire resources from all over the world. That's the idea in a nutshell. Many scientists would have moods and that would determine how progressive they are/ what they do/invent.

[baconman]

Is this about the mood itself, or about the expression thereof? Because if it's a matter of expression more than an actual disposition (lending with it stuff like personal impressions), then perhaps a combination of body language options would be better suited to the task.

EYES:
-Make eye contact
-Make seductive eye contact
-Make personal (non-eye) contact
-Avoid contact

HEAD:
-Chin up
-Forward/focused
-"Step on a crack"

MOUTH:
-Left (smile, smirk, neutral, concern, sad)
-Right (same)
-Open/shut (something like 3-4 degrees)
-Teeth (clenched, relaxed, open)

POSTURE:
-Shoulders up
-Shoulders across
-Shoulders relaxed/low
-Back (arched back)
-Back (up straight)
-Back (relaxed/low)
-Pelvis forward
-Torso neutral
-Ass sticking out

FEET:
-Flat
-Cross-legged
-Weight on one leg
-Tippie-toes

[SundownKid]

Coming soon from Foddy: the body language simulator that you control with all your keyboard keys! 

[eiyukabe]

antymattar, have you checked out Storytron? http://storytron.com/ag-actors.php. If you go to that page and search for "Mood Traits" you'll find Crawford's take on moods. Not sure what your project is, and I'm not sure what the future of Storytron is (it was looking grim last I heard), but it might be something you want to look into to use as a tool or for inspiration for your own system.

With that said, I am going to go on a small tangent and say that I don't see algorithmic emotions as the next step in dynamic storytelling (I know you're not necessarily trying to make a "story" antymatter, which is why this is admittedly a tangent -- algorithmic emotions can probably continue to work fine when the characters are tokens in a game world and their emotions are the mechanics/resources you need to work with).

I've worked with storytron a little and played some sample storyworlds, and the narrative pull just isn't there. I would instead like to see a system for making brute-force hand-authoring more feasible. Generative facial/skeletal animation (dynamic lip synch, random blinking, body language based on mood -- a lot of this is already there). Fast content generation and debugging tools for hand-crafted hypertext structures. Plausible computer-generated voice so you don't have to pay a fortune for voice acting all your story branches. Some basic "brain" for your story characters so they can remember things that have happened though most of their reactions are still hand-written.

I would love to experience a computer-augmented storyworld whose millions of different paths are just as good as a Pixar movie plot. Or if the generated story isn't so good I can at least find satisfaction in the experience of agency in a complex world. Unfortunately, my experiences with such systems (storytron, facade, my own attempts) lead me to believe that the story path that gets generated is too awkward to even find joy in agency. I don't think this is a feasible approach in the foreseeable future because you end up with millions of boring story paths adding noise to a few interesting story paths that the user will have a hard time finding. Generating lots of things is easy for computers, but sifting through the cruft and finding gold is still what humans do best.

[Theophilus]

Coming soon from Foddy: the body language simulator that you control with all your keyboard keys! 

It's called QWOPstitution.

[antymattar]

yeah. figures.

[Helmeted]

Have you seen The Grimace Project? It's an interactive Flash thing that's based on a similar idea. It displays a face and you have sliders to control the expression of six emotional states. I came across it as it's useful for an art reference.

[antymattar]

Hmm... But it only lets you toggle 2 of the 6 emmotions. Thats weird.