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[gimymblert]

Don't be fool by small entry, I like exhaustive entry, spread out is better to my health because I CANNOT NOT READ 
That's too interesting, that's almost a crime to be so interesting.

The problem is on my side lol

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Hah, well, understood. This weekend is entirely free, so expect a lot of coding and another nice big update next time!

[saluk]

Amazing. 1000 expansions on top of what already seems to be one of the most in-depth conversation systems I've ever seen. Individual personalities within a culture. NPCs who get bored easily and ones who listen too long and give away too much.

Even a scrollbar!

What will he think of next?

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Haha, thanks! Well, there IS actually more coming - see this weekend's update for more info!

[gimymblert]

Make it 3D and you can market yourself as no man sky killer and become rich in an instant

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Make it 3D and you can market yourself as no man sky killer and become rich in an instant

Don't tempt me!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

All the remaining default conversation options, and all the remaining expansions, are now complete. I’ve also altered the expansion code such that certain expansions aren’t tied to certain words or sentences within a language and guaranteed to appear whenever that sentence or word is said, but instead they appear with a % chance for every instance of a particularly word or phrase someone in that dialect says, depending on their sentence complexity (as we discussed before, sentence complexity is now tied to individuals, not to entire cultures). Here’s a couple of examples, courtesy of our good playtesting friend, Orangejaw Moonblizzard, and some NPCs who may or may not have had their origins changed using admin commands for the sake of testing (as you’ll notice these replies could not be for the same nation!)…





Negative Replies

The big thing this week and weekend has been working on negative replies – so, for instance, if you ask “Are we near the desert?”, the default response is “We are near [desert] in [direction]”, or whatever, but obviously a valid option is “We are not near the desert” – and this obviously applies to loads of questions. What if the speaker’s nation has no army, or dislikes art, or have never travelled, or doesn’t know any other civilizations, or lives on a tiny island and knows nothing of the wider world, or doesn’t worship a religion, and so on? We therefore now have a body of negative replies for people to basically say “no”, “that’s irrelevant”, “I don’t know”, or “I don’t care”, in hundreds of thousands of interesting ways!

These negative replies effectively now split up into two categories, which we could usefully call “general” and “specific” negative replies. “General” negative replies include replies like “I don’t know”, “I don’t remember”, “I’d rather not answer”, “I’m not authorized to give you that information”, etc, which can apply to a huge range of NPCs in a huge range of situations. Since the player will run into these fairly often, I’ve made sure that there’s a lot of variation in these general negative responses – although in many cases, of course, there’s only so many ways that you can actually utter some of these things, but here are a few examples.



“Specific” negative replies refer to asking a question where the answer is still answering the question, rather than a general answer, but still a negative. For instance, if you ask someone what they think a particular policy in their nation should be, they might reply “I have no interest in politics”, or if you ask someone whether they know any distant cities you might want to visit, they might say “I know of no distant cities” – and so on and so forth. Each of these is often more specific and more varied than the above, so I’m trying to bias people towards using these wherever possible, although they are naturally dependent upon particular cultural/political/religious situations.



Crowd Disinterest

You’ll all recall the “conversation interest” idea that URR conversations will have implemented – that unless you ask relevant questions, NPCs will quickly lose interest in talking to you. This is to stop the player just going through every single question one after the other, and to encourage you towards asking sensible, logical and appropriate questions. However, I realized the other day that I can’t just limit this to a specific NPC getting bored; if you have a bunch of general questions you’re asking every soldier, for instance, then you could just go from one soldier over to the next soldier in the barracks and start questioning them, ignoring the questions you already asked Soldier 1, but assuming (quite fairly) that they will probably respond the same way, seeing as both Soldier 1 and Soldier 2 are just default soldiers.

Therefore, I need to implement some kind of “crowd disinterest” solution, and I think I’m going to do this on two levels. On the “local level”, NPCs within a building will see who you’re talking to and what you’re asking them about, and also within a map grid (within your line of sight, or nearby), and will take note of the questions. So if you question Soldier 1 about pointless stuff, and they tell you to go away, then you start asking Soldier 2 pointless stuff, the time it’ll take Soldier 2 to lose interest will be shorter than normal; Soldier 3’s will then be even shorter; and so forth. Then, at the global level, I think we need a system whereby information about the player slowly spreads through cultures/cities/religions/etc in the entire world so that people get some idea of whether they should respond to the player or not. Neither of these systems will be in 0.8, but they definitely need to be there.

Next Week

Remember those two new conversation features I mentioned a while back – replies and counter-questions – and also all those questions that have more complex replies, such as lists? Some combination of those will be coming next week – probably the complex replies, I would think. See you then!

[gimymblert]

Make it 3D and you can market yourself as no man sky killer and become rich in an instant

Don't tempt me!

I mean think about it, the perfect space fantasy, hope from planet to planet and see different alien civilizations and engage in their culture! I don't what cartoon you watch as a child but ulysses 31, cobra space adventure, alabator, sankukai, etc ... they are the perfect fit!

 

More on point on URR 
It made thinking about negation, what if someone hide purposefully information due to social or psychological disposition (for example it's taboo), the face would have eye looking elsewhere to signal the character knowing something but you can't access it with his current interest level in the conversation, so you may have to lighten him up (if embarrassed) or prove you are trustworthy (if taboo or suspicious) by bringing fact you know and just doing the poper social pattern (going through mandatory politeness pattern, like in china where you must first refuse favor before accepting them to not be seen as arrogant; or dressing the proper way like you need that ceremonial knife correctly on the correct side and adressing hierarchy the proper way), which would challenge the player knowledge of the world, understanding of culture, etiquette, social hierarchy order and people he met lol. With all the tell in the speech pattern to decipher to know whom we are speaking for (the adept of this cult avoid directly referecing this government that oppressed them but can't be open about it so they have a slighty different speech pattern that give underhanded compliment to this goverment with reference only them can pick on based on their belief, the tell is that if you understand those belief you get the reference and know how to behave to unlock more information and thrust from them)
Disregard just a nerd adding fuel on the complexity fire lol

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Haha, I shall reply once I have a spare bit of brain space

---

Two exciting realisations about in-game conversations this past fortnight! In the process of continuing with sentence generation it became rapidly apparent that in order to actually ensure conversational flow, and to boost the range of experiences that the player can actually have in talking to the game’s NPCs, several new additions would have to be made. As readers will remember, until now there have been basically three kinds of question – the kinds of question that anyone can be asked from the start of the game (such as “What do you do?” or “What are your religious beliefs?”), the kind of question that only specific people can be asked from the start of the game (such as “What are you guarding?” which would apply only to guards, but can always be asked), and the kind of question that can only be asked after a particular trigger is met (such as “What do you think of the novels of [author]?”, which requires you to have come across the author). There is another “category” of question, as well as a new kind of reply that both the player and the NPC will be able to produce within a conversation. These do not especially increase the required volume of sentence generation implementation, as the creation of an overall framework for sentences (in progress) will be equally applicable to all possible sentences, but they will substantially enhance the variation of in-game conversations, and also their realism and believability. Read on!

Counter-Questions

Counter-questions are, as you might expect, questions that the person you’re talking to winds up asking you, which then lead to a variety of possible replies. So, for instance, they might ask you about YOUR religion, in which case you can be truthful or lie and so forth, and the same will then apply for a range of scenarios. Questions of this sort will be particularly relevant when trying to get past guards, for instance, or when trying to enter particularly restrictive or xenophobic or militaristic nations, and the like. I think this will add a very strong extra layer into the conversation system and the ability for the player to “bluff” their way through certain areas, whilst also (like the above points) boosting the realism of the system by changing it away from a rather simpler question-and-answer system. Here’s an example of what counter-questions might look like based on some of the conversations from last week:



Replies

A “reply” in URR is something that can only be said in response to another person’s statement. When a reply is possible, the “Replies” dropdown list will appear, highlighted, right to the special options and to the left of the dialects. Clicking this option will then offer this special sentence/response; if you select another option that isn’t in the replies list, the replies will remain and can be returned to later in the conversation, so this isn’t just a one-off chance. This means that as particularly long conversations continue, the number of possible replies will grow, but it will never grow above half a dozen or so at the most, I would think, and some of the replies will actually be the same as other default questions that simply take on newfound relevance after a previous question. Here’s the same conversation with some answers and two different models: which do you prefer? In the first version the reply and the next question are apart, and the other person might make another comment, whereas in the second version, the reply and the next question are combined…





If you don’t select the reply when prompted, various things will happen. If they ask you a question and you just go onto asking them another question, they’ll likely be offended. Alternatively, some replies will be akin to “follow-on” questions, so they mention something, and you can then pursue that with them as a result of that conversation. These options will stay in your reply options for that character forever, and can be addressed (or not) whenever.

I’m going to implement this because as I experimented, it became clear that conversational flow in real life is obviously far more of a back-and-forth than a question-and-answer, and the system needed to reflect this. The reply will allow the player to get more depth about a specific question asked instead of moving onto another question, and should be especially relevant if the NPC being talked to winds up revealing something the player wasn’t previously aware of, and wants more information on.

In the process, though, I found myself wondering about the exact flow of the overall. Right now the system is that you select a topic, you select a question, then the questions window closes and you see it spoken and a reply given. This is largely from the inevitable constraints on the size of the screen, fitting in questions as well as images and topic lists, and so forth. I became briefly concerned that this might actually break up the flow of conversation, especially if you want to ask two questions from the same topic list one after the other. To help cancel this out, if you return immediately to a conversation topic you’ll be at the same part of it you previously scrolled into, and I also added in a system that will keep any letters typed in for the search function whilst you’re still in one topic. So let’s say you ask about Artwork X from Nation Y, and you found the question by typing in Nation X’s name into the “Art” menu, and that question is asked, and then you want to ask about another artwork from Nation X, going immediately back into the art list will keep the letters there, but changing to another menu will reset the letter tracker. I think this is quite a good compromise. Equally, of course, we should remember that the conversation system in URR is specifically designed to be a little slower and more thoughtful than the systems one gets in more RPGs where the player is encouraged to just exhaust conversation options. I think the current system (with these recent changes) will now work very smoothly, actually, and I’m happy with the balance between ease-of-access and possibly encouraging the player to think about other relevant options as a conversation progresses.

Next few weeks:

In the coming weeks I’ll be trying (see below) to continue the implementation of counter-questions and work on the implementation of replies, as well as adding all the “Hmm…” stuff and punctuation options into conversations properly, rather than having them only present as a placeholder to test how things look. The other big thing to handle now is that all the [religion] or [date] or [place] modifiers work; a few have been implemented, but again, just quickly and crudely to get a feel for the system. Another task for the coming weeks is to go to all of these, make sure they work, and to make sure NPCs already spawn with the requisite information for personal details – “I was born in [place] in [year]” – as well as civilisation details – “I am from [nation] and we worship [religion]”, and so on. There’s a pretty big selection of these,so it’ll take a bit.

Why no blog post last week?

Last week was the first time in several years I missed a blog update – this, unfortunately, is simply because I am basically working twelve hours, every day including weekends right now, and I’m totally swamped with my work at the moment. Believe me, folks, I am *incredibly* desperate to get 0.8 finally finished and out, but there’s just so much on my plate at the moment with strict fixed deadlines which has to be prioritised, and it’s hard to carve out any time (even at weekends) to do much coding. Just rest assured I am working as hard as I possibly can to get 0.8 released, and I’m really sorry it’s taking so long and I feel tremendously guilty about dragging it out, but things are really tough right now (due also to other life issues beyond what I’ve described here) and I’m deeply stressed out, but doing my best. There’s only so many hours in the day and I just cannot prioritise coding at this month/two-month moment in my life, but I’m trying to grab an hour here and there to just inch forward on conversation implementation. In the coming month, therefore, some of most of the blog entries are going to be other entries on general games topics of discussion/interest I’ve had written for a while and I think you folks will be interested in, and I’ll upload those instead if (as is likely) there isn’t really any URR update to put out. I hope you’ll enjoy these entries; people have always enjoyed these before, so I hope these will keep you all occupied until I’m out of this rough patch. I’m really sorry, I hope you all understand, and I promise 0.8 will be worth it.

[s0]

I think you may have just created the best dynamic dialog system in a game ever.

I prefer the second screenshot. The first makes the mechanics behind the dialog too obvious imo.

PS Hang in there, take your time and don't burn yourself out!  

[Christian]

I think you may have just created the best dynamic dialog system in a game ever.

I prefer the second screenshot. The first makes the mechanics behind the dialog too obvious imo.

PS Hang in there, take your time and don't burn yourself out!  

Idk, I think the first one has a better conversational flow. The "Ah, I see" seems like a natural reply and segway, while the second has you going from religion to currency without a comment in between.

[JobLeonard]

Idk, I think the first one has a better conversational flow. The "Ah, I see" seems like a natural reply and segway, while the second has you going from religion to currency without a comment in between.

Not only that, but I'd expect that the responses could be quite a lot richer than just "Ah, I see"- like "I have met priests of Mokkpolarot, they are most wise", immediately giving you an idea of the NPC's opinions. Or even more interesting: your answer could be followed by a follow-up question: "What?! You worship a god that demands child sacrifice?"

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

I think you may have just created the best dynamic dialog system in a game ever.

I prefer the second screenshot. The first makes the mechanics behind the dialog too obvious imo.

PS Hang in there, take your time and don't burn yourself out!  

Wow, that's high praise! Thanks my friend . I do hope so! And thanks, I will definitely do so

Idk, I think the first one has a better conversational flow. The "Ah, I see" seems like a natural reply and segway, while the second has you going from religion to currency without a comment in between.

Interesting; responses have been mixed, but people seem to like the "two sentence" option slightly more than the one sentence option. I haven't totally decided yet, though.

Not only that, but I'd expect that the responses could be quite a lot richer than just "Ah, I see"- like "I have met priests of Mokkpolarot, they are most wise", immediately giving you an idea of the NPC's opinions. Or even more interesting: your answer could be followed by a follow-up question: "What?! You worship a god that demands child sacrifice?"

Oh, DEFINITELY. Yeah, I totally want this in there, but it's going to be 0.9, not 0.8! Allowing the player to go down these "channels" of many replies and questions sounds tremendously exciting to me, and the kind of thing that, if sufficiently rare, but with a large enough database of options, will always seem like a very interesting and unexpected happening to the player, which is so important in these sorts of games

[s0]

I think you may have just created the best dynamic dialog system in a game ever.

I prefer the second screenshot. The first makes the mechanics behind the dialog too obvious imo.

PS Hang in there, take your time and don't burn yourself out!  

Wow, that's high praise! Thanks my friend .

It's not hyperbole. Interactive dialog in games has a lot of problems. It tends to feel canned and rigid and increases the "animatronic" feel that dialog in games already has by default (example: the persuasion minigame in Oblivion). The interaction also tends to be binary. This is because NPCs in most games only exist to help or hinder the player's progress somehow (or as background decoration). This is why interactive dialog is almost always based around either getting or not getting something out of an NPC (a piece of info, a quest, an item etc). In other words it's treated purely as a gating mechanism. This also means that the player is always acting as a manipulator rather than someone who communicates eye to eye.

Your system seems like it could be a way out of that.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Well, thanks . I certainly hope so. I've often basically defined my design goals as "what have people not done before?" - I mean, of course people have done physical world generation before, and so forth, but broadly speaking I have tried to search for little niches and nuances that nobody has yet done, and pursue those, and that's certainly the case for the speech/conversation generation. I can't wait to get back to development in a month once my brain is a little freer to actually think about these things...

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Any of you roguelikers at TwitchCon?!

[failrate]

Good god!  If I had known you were going to be at Twitch Con, I would have pinged you!  That's in my city!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Damn! Well, I might be back NEXT year to give a talk, as Twitch have invited my colleague and I to feed back on our current research - ask me nearer the time!

[gimymblert]

Hey if any of your talk are video'd I hope you share them here :D

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

I will!

In the mean time though...

---

After several months where I just haven’t been able to find even a couple of hours to code, I am extremely pleased to report that I’ve managed to get through this incredible glut of academic work and emerge into the wonderful fields on the other side. As such, this coming week I am now officially resuming development on 0.8 in my spare time – which is still not extensive, but at least I have some of it now, with more to come as the start of next calendar year comes to pass – with the objective of getting 0.8 polished off and finally released in the next few months.

So: where were we, and what remains to be done?

The State of 0.8

0.8 is, by far, the biggest release I have ever done and the biggest release I ever intend to do. Had I known that I’d run into this unexpected delay towards the end of the release, I would definitely not have tried to develop the speech systems alongside everything else and I would released everything except speech as 0.8, then released speech and conversations as 0.9, but as it stands, there are several major parts of 0.8:

NPCs

The current version available here on the site, 0.7, has a massively detailed world devoid of people. This has now been addressed, and there are millions of people – all procedurally generated, with the important ones stored and tracked, and the less important ones spawning and despawning to give a sense of the crowds the player moves through – that can be met in the in-game world. This, obviously, is one of the biggest changes to and developments in the game, and is the last major “system” that needs to be in place, and – via the conversation system – marks, finally, the beginning of actual gameplay! Although a lot of coding was required to keep track of NPCs at various resolutions, near the player, far from the player, inside buildings, outside buildings, inside or outside buildings that hadn’t been spawned yet, and so on and so forth, we finally got there. All NPC systems are finished, and only a few tiny bugs remain (found by my kind playtesters) to be fixed prior to a release of 0.8.





Clothing and Face Generation

Alongside these NPCs we have clothing and face generation. Clothing generation can offer many millions of variations of clothing styles, which the game then varies in four levels – “lower”, “middle”, “upper”, “ruler” – and distributes appropriately to NPCs. You can then view the clothing of anyone you run into, and the player of course now also starts with a set of clothing appropriate to the civilization they start in. Face generation, meanwhile, creates a set of genetic and cultural variations which can produce high hundreds of millions of faces, I believe, allowing you to make judgements about both the geographic and national/religious origins of people you encounter. Both of these systems are fully integrated and finished.



Buildings, Districts, etc

An entirely new, massively, and massively important class of buildings have been added: castles. The aesthetics of these vary according to their civilisation of origin (as do all buildings) whilst what is found inside varies according to the ideological and religious orientations of that nation; you’ll find altars, banners, barracks, torture chambers, dungeons, libraries, studies, and a million other things in there (alongside a relevant set of NPCs to inhabit them and move around within them). In districts, meanwhile, I’ve gone over and changed a bunch of the generation algorithms, fixed some unusual edge cases which could sometimes appear, made sure NPCs can always path to where they need to path to, and basically ensured that districts do function correctly in all the ways they have to. All castles and district changes are in place with the exception of a few tiny bugs to do with castle generation that need to be resolved before release.



Speech and Conversations

This is the final one, and the biggest one, since it marks the first meaningful element of gameplay being introduced into the game – which is to say, talking to people, questioning them, acquiring information from, presenting oneself in certain ways, deciding which topics to pursue, and all the other conversation mechanics and dynamics I’ve talked about in blog posts before this one. Speech generation is partly complete, and conversation mechanics are partly complete.



What next?

Therefore, there are basically three objectives left to cover before I can release 0.8, each of which is probably approximately of around equal size:

1) Finish Speech Generation

The primary objective is, obviously, finishing the generation of all sentences and potential responses. Now, you’ll remember from some of the final blog entries before I went on the coding break that I was introducing some more complex speech systems, but I’ve decided it’s more important to get 0.8 than it is to implement all the speech dynamics I have in mind. As such, I’m toning back some of these ambitions for the 0.8 release, and whatever kinds of sentences and comments don’t make it into 0.8 will make it into the (small and compact) 0.9 that should appear quite soon afterwards. Nevertheless, there are lots of sentence archetypes that need finishing, lots of sentence components, lots of variations for ideologies/ geographies/ cultures/ religions/ etc that need to be implemented, and then – most importantly – I need to make it all actually generates correctly! There’s so much content in there that some weird grammar mistakes are bound to crop up, and I’m sure some spelling mistakes have slipped in too, all of which need to be fixed.

2) Finish Conversation Mechanics

Right now actual “conversations” don’t really happen, since the AI you’re talking to just produces a response without, for instance, asking you something back. As above, since I’m not putting in every possible sentence form in this release, I’m also not putting in ever possible conversation mechanic into this release, but I still want things to flow quite well and to be quite interesting to deal with. Even though I hope to get 0.9 out fairly speedily, this is still going to be a version a lot of people are going to play for a lot of time, and I want to make sure there’s enough there to reward the wait, even if 20% of the mechanics I want will just have to wait until a later version when I can take the time to really perfect them.

3) Finish all Tweaks, Fix Bugs, Optimisations, etc

Not much to say here – I just have a list of things that need fixing, and I’m going to fix them. Now, some of these I’m going to leave for 0.9, which is going to be a far shorter release anyway, though it’ll only be the bugs that aren’t game-breaking, or are perhaps entirely aesthetic, that I’ll leave until then. Anything critical, or anything that is definitely going to be noticed, needs to be fixed now.

Therefore:

It has been very hard on me to have to stop programming for a period and cease, however temporarily, working on a project that I care so much about and means so much to me. I know some people will have drifted away, I know the blog has lost some readership in the last few months, and – chances are – some people will have seen this as proof that a big project like this is doomed to fail! But worry not: we’re back, and the ramp back up to the speed I was developing last summer will take a little while, but it’s going to happen. My schedule and my life more generally will be freeing up gradually over the coming months, to some extent Jan/Feb/March, and even more so April/May/June/July, and that spare time will be going into URR. Next summer (much like last summer) in particular will give me ample time to code, and I’ll certainly be taking advantage of it. I’m starting now to keep the code open, to check in on what needs doing, remind myself where I left off, and to start slowly but surely developing the speech content first and foremost, as that’s certainly the easiest thing to get back into the swing with. URRpdates in the coming weeks might be smaller than normal, but they will still have something to show. URR is back, and the final push towards the first gameplay release is now – finally – on.