More fleshed out conversations and such.

Talk among developers, and propose and discuss general development planning/tackling/etc... feature in this forum.
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travists
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More fleshed out conversations and such.

Post by travists »

The discussion on videos turned to cut-scenes which had a dialog offshoot. I'm sure anybody that has played the game enough to know what they would like to see additional has found out that the conversation choices are rather limited. My idea was for primarily scripted encounters during missions whereby you could, for example, choose to hear the pleas of your bounty target and then double cross your employer. However this quickly turned to talk of chatterbots and the like for every ship. I tend to agree that sending a friendly message should garner more than a random friendly/hostile message back based on relations. Any thoughts on how involved the conversations should be?
klauss
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Re: More fleshed out conversations and such.

Post by klauss »

Designing chatterbots is an art on itself. Maybe there's libraries for it?
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travists
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Re: More fleshed out conversations and such.

Post by travists »

Most of what I am seeing is server based toys. While a full chatterbot is a great idea, perhaps it needs to be scaled back to a dozen or so scripted conversations per type (I.E. Faction + role + relation).
klauss
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Re: More fleshed out conversations and such.

Post by klauss »

It might be easier to use a library, but it depends on the library.

In any case, finding out whether there's a suitable library, should be a first step. Remember dialogues need audio too, the library should be friendly towards that use case. I'm not talking about speech synthesis, only the ability to assign audio snippets to dialogue lines.
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IansterGuy
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Re: More fleshed out conversations and such.

Post by IansterGuy »

Ha ha, a working chatter bot system that can stay on a subject learn from you and synthesize a voice would be awesome. I had that thought too and did some research. A trouble now with them learning though would be that they just learn to mimic people. They hardly develop a distinct personality because they don't know what they are saying. I don't know how well open source versions work but I imagine they will get better and better. I just talked to a zealot Chatterbot and it held up a conversation well, but the most entertaining things is said to start a conversation was prefabricated scripts, the questions and answers followed my syntax and rephrased it in it's reply. Some of them can tell if your being hostile, that maybe useful so that players have to think of a unique insult to continue taunting a ship. I have yet to see a learning chat bot in a game. There is probably good reason, don't need the thing swearing and saying real world prejudice things.
travists
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Re: More fleshed out conversations and such.

Post by travists »

Well, even holding the same conversation for more than one line would help. Right now, say something get a random responce based on friend/hostile score.
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