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Author Topic: Factions  (Read 22916 times)
Tsuku
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« on: June 27, 2012, 09:50:56 PM »

Disclaimer: This post is pure speculation and is not related in any way to how the dev will end up doing the AI, races or factions.  Tongue

So, about this thing with the different races/factions, I am curious as to how this will work. I'm assuming that the dev will create factions for the different... well, factions. So, for example, a human npc might be a member of the faction/group: Humans. The faction the npc belongs to would effect the npc's interaction with other factions. An npc belonging to the human faction might have a positive "opinion" of a member of the simian faction, and a negative opinion of a faction such as bandits, predators, or perhaps the reptilian faction. This would also affect how the npcs might react the the player character as well: if the PC is avian, he might get a better reception in an avian village.

The faction mechanic I just described is nothing special, alot of games use something of that sort; however, with the AI the dev seems to be planning, the faction system could work alot better. With the goal oriented planning, and the AI "personalities" or alignments, really REALLY cool faction interactions could be possible, with alot more realism. For example, if a certain member of the human faction had a more tolerant personality, he might have less of a problem with other factions (perhaps he has a trait called "tolerant" which adds 5 to his factions default opinion of all factions.)

Of course, there are other ways it can be done, and I'm definitely no professional.  Cheesy if anyone has any ideas on how factions etc. might work, post them here! And if pspeed wants to correct my clumsy rant, that's also fine!  Tongue
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pspeed
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« Reply #1 on: June 27, 2012, 10:34:10 PM »

Factions are good and Mythruna may see something like that.  If so then it will be built from the other direction.

Part of the planning in the AI will be based on the idea of costs.  A particular action may cost more than another for obvious reasons (the food in your hand is easier to eat than the food at the market, for example)... but there will also be costs that are purely derived from the AI character's personality.  For example, eating food will be cheaper than killing and eating your friend... and killing and eat your enemy will be cheaper than killing and eating your friend.

Months and months ago when I started really thinking about AI, I tried to quantify the sort of personality traits that an NPC character would need.  While I could imagine all sorts of uses for one parameter or another it rapidly became clear that it is better to work from the other direction.  There will be some actions.  This full list is yet to be determined.  Some actions will have a personality influence and it will be clear at the time what personality trait should be exposed for that action.  For example, the costs of picking someone's pocket are based on probably a dozen different factors: lawfulness, boldness, etc... a "faction" would only be one tiny part and I'd argue that it limits the AI more than it frees it.  Why shouldn't the right kind of thief steal from his own faction, after all?  And maybe some of the races have no problem with cannibalism but are otherwise severely loyal to one another.

The idea of a "faction" is kind of too broad of a stroke in these cases.

When a character meets another character, it will assess how it feels about them and setup certain relationship parameters (yet to be determined)... these will be the first impression.  The parameters might include: trust, hostility, respect... whatever the action cost functions dictate is necessary for proper costing of a plan.  The race, look, and behavior of a character will factor into how these parameters are set for another character.  After that, they can change based on experience.  This also prevents the case where an AI character automatically trusts a character from their faction even though that character has stolen from them 50 times.

My feeling is that if there are factions... then it will just feed this "initial impression" calculation... and for some types of characters may not matter at all.

Interesting discussion. Smiley  I hope I'm able to achieve something like the above.

P.S.: For the record, the "initial impression function" is more important than the above might elude to.  In my mind, it will be potentially infeasible for every AI character to have a half-dozen relationship parameters for every other AI character they've met.  It's also a bit unrealistic to have a perfect record of even passing acquaintances.  Consequently, I plan to have a character keep only a few "close" relationships with the full parameters.  This will be based on the frequency of interaction, strength of the feelings, etc... beyond this a larger number of character relationships will be boiled down to one general "feeling" score.  Character A might remember that he dislikes character B that he hasn't seen in two years but may not remember exactly why.  In this case, the one parameter is passed into the "first impression cost" function when they come into contact again so that the relationship parameters can be built out again.  If character B leaves and character A meets 10 other people then A's relationship with B may go back to being a single parameter again.

...I know, I probably just lost at least half of you.
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Caladin
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« Reply #2 on: June 27, 2012, 10:57:33 PM »

Part of the planning in the AI will be based on the idea of costs.  A particular action may cost more than another for obvious reasons (the food in your hand is easier to eat than the food at the market, for example)... but there will also be costs that are purely derived from the AI character's personality.  For example, eating food will be cheaper than killing and eating your friend... and killing and eat your enemy will be cheaper than killing and eating your friend.

Is this confirming that you are going to consider adding cannibalism in the game? (though, in theory, eating say, a dwarf, wouldn't be cannibalism I suppose)
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pspeed
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« Reply #3 on: June 27, 2012, 11:29:05 PM »

Is this confirming that you are going to consider adding cannibalism in the game? (though, in theory, eating say, a dwarf, wouldn't be cannibalism I suppose)

Not necessarily... but it's funny.  Given the right circumstances the AI would do it whether I wanted it to or not... I'd have to specifically forbid it to keep it from happening.

It all hinges on creature drops.  If a reptilian kills a pantherian then it is entirely logical that they would at the very list skin them and collect bones.  I see no reason a reptilian wouldn't eat that meat.  There are other "setting" issues that I don't want to give away right now but suffice it to say that all living creatures will drop bones, skin, and meat, etc..  The quantity and quality will depend on a few factors that aren't important here.

Given that... if killing produces meat and meat is edible then the AI will certainly figure out that killing leads to eating.  I either specifically code a "yeah, but don't eat the meat of your own race" condition or cost it out of contention or cannibalism would be rampant... entirely based on how willing you are to kill the other thing.  I do already know that races will have taboos against eating certain meat.  Humans won't normally eat the meat of any other race and Simians will be even more restrictive on their meat consumption.  Most of the races will shun reptilian meat because it can make you sick if not cooked right... and the pantherians will otherwise have no issue with eating anything that moves.

But I like the idea of treating taboos as just cost factors... which means that if some town is starving to death then maybe the costs and action plan works out such that they go murder all of the guys in prison to have a meal.  So same-race meat may have some huge cost factor but that doesn't rule out extreme conditions.

I'll probably have to leave the cost as a configurable setting to appease the more squeamish.  Plus I think it would be a funny checkbox to have: "Races never eat their own meat."

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pspeed
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« Reply #4 on: June 27, 2012, 11:31:16 PM »

Oh, and I feel obliged to drop a hint about the eighth race here.  Except there is no eighth race and they are definitely not called "the whispers" in folk legend.
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Tsuku
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« Reply #5 on: June 27, 2012, 11:38:37 PM »

Haha, woah, epic post. You didn't lose me though, I think I understand what you mean. That seems to be a very ambitious system.  Shocked Ambition is good though. What you're saying is that when it comes down to intimate/important relationships, (say, husband/wife, or trader/favorite customer,) the way the relationship will be decided will be more complex than villager 1's relationship with villager 2? So, an npc might have several relationships based on a bunch of factors, and then have the more standard "I like him +3" kind of relationship with someone he's only met once who lives faraway but once gave him a candy bar? I over simplified it, but is that the general idea?

By the way, will beasts have the same kind of relationship system as humanoids in this case? Or a different one?
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Tsuku
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« Reply #6 on: June 27, 2012, 11:42:33 PM »

And considering that you're going to make almost everything cost based, could that mean that an npc could theoretically stoop to any action at all? or would there be some actions that would simply be more costly than allowing the NPC to die? (A knight/priest might consider eating human flesh more costly than dying.)
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pspeed
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« Reply #7 on: June 28, 2012, 12:02:10 AM »

Haha, woah, epic post. You didn't lose me though, I think I understand what you mean. That seems to be a very ambitious system.  Shocked Ambition is good though. What you're saying is that when it comes down to intimate/important relationships, (say, husband/wife, or trader/favorite customer,) the way the relationship will be decided will be more complex than villager 1's relationship with villager 2? So, an npc might have several relationships based on a bunch of factors, and then have the more standard "I like him +3" kind of relationship with someone he's only met once who lives faraway but once gave him a candy bar? I over simplified it, but is that the general idea?

Yeah, basically.  Everything in the game is an "entity" and an entity can have any type of thing tacked onto it.  There's a lot of power in this that I won't go into here... anyway, in this case, a relationship one character has for another is an entity.  It can have a bunch of pieces of data tacked onto it and I don't need to specifically decide what those are... as I can always add more later.  To avoid combinatorial data explosion, I will limit the number of fully fleshed out relationships that a particular character can have.  This may be based on a stat (maybe intelligence means they can remember more relationships or whatever.) or just be arbitrary or based on several factors.  And in my mind, there are three categories of relationship:
1) fully expanded: character A is interacting with character B right now or he is in that character's "sphere".  (google "monkey sphere" sometime... it's fun).
2) passing relationship: character B fell off the bottom of character A's category (1) relationships.
3) who are you?: relationship was deleted and/or doesn't exist yet.  If they met before then character A doesn't remember it.

How quickly relationships transition in and out of these states will depend on a lot of factors.

By the way, will beasts have the same kind of relationship system as humanoids in this case? Or a different one?

Yes, though not as expanded.  I want to have actions related to "pets" or domesticated animals.  So human to creature relationships will need some parameters... but ideally they somehow fit into the animal's normal creature to creature relationship set.  For example, in real life, my dog definitely has a concept of where her place in our "pack" (ie: the family) is... even though we are human she views us as her pack.  So taming a wild animal might involve only one or two additional parameters on top of the normal pack parameters.
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pspeed
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« Reply #8 on: June 28, 2012, 12:09:22 AM »

And considering that you're going to make almost everything cost based, could that mean that an npc could theoretically stoop to any action at all? or would there be some actions that would simply be more costly than allowing the NPC to die? (A knight/priest might consider eating human flesh more costly than dying.)

Correct.  And a simian would likely die before eating any uncooked flesh... and definitely the flesh of a sentient animal.  Racially, their base cost is that much higher.

See, this is kind of what I'm talking about, already in this discussion we've moved really far out from the concept of factions as anything but a basic cost template.  But I bet if I thought about it, I could get all meat eating down to two (maybe three) independent general scores that could be directly reflected in a personality as some traits.  But that's for another time. Smiley
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ahmadsal
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« Reply #9 on: June 28, 2012, 09:31:28 AM »

haha, This exact same thought came into my head yesterday too.  Wink I was thinking more in the line of a castle (or large town) who has a ruler that will hire a small army that will walk the streets. My train of thought was moving the same as tsuku though in regards of absolute friendly/enemy. I knew that wasn't were you were headed since I also thought that would limit the rpg style of the game.

Also, since right now the world is half water (should change when you get different land types?), I think you should add many fish. I don't know if all races can swim (under or over) but having both good, eatable fish and bad man-eating fish in there would make the water pretty interesting. (haha, ships would be epic but it would be hard to make them move. Maybe adding a special button on object maker that allows specific objects to be boardable and wood floats/ stone sinks/ etc)

Sorry for messy post. Just woke up, might edit it later to make more sense  Grin
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pspeed
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« Reply #10 on: June 28, 2012, 10:07:51 AM »

haha, This exact same thought came into my head yesterday too.  Wink I was thinking more in the line of a castle (or large town) who has a ruler that will hire a small army that will walk the streets. My train of thought was moving the same as tsuku though in regards of absolute friendly/enemy. I knew that wasn't were you were headed since I also thought that would limit the rpg style of the game.

Also, since right now the world is half water (should change when you get different land types?), I think you should add many fish. I don't know if all races can swim (under or over) but having both good, eatable fish and bad man-eating fish in there would make the water pretty interesting. (haha, ships would be epic but it would be hard to make them move. Maybe adding a special button on object maker that allows specific objects to be boardable and wood floats/ stone sinks/ etc)

Sorry for messy post. Just woke up, might edit it later to make more sense  Grin

Ships, fish, sharks, etc. are already on the plan.  Ships are a definite.  My interest in playing the game will be half without water and air ships. Smiley
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BigredRm
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« Reply #11 on: June 28, 2012, 12:21:15 PM »

Im thinking airships and ships will be a very attractive addition. Just building things around Iron Island, I have both of those vehicles. Well more of a hot air baloon than an airship but I may hop on tonight and build one.
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ayoriceball
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« Reply #12 on: June 28, 2012, 04:27:55 PM »

Is there a possibility for land vehicles as well?
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Tsuku
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« Reply #13 on: June 28, 2012, 05:09:55 PM »

OK, cool, so tameable animals. Cheesy Well, since the thread's gone in another direction, I don't feel so bad asking: you mentioned randomised or player created weapons; but will there be armor? And if so, will it be dynamic like the weapons? And will it be race specific? (dwarves can wear uber-heavy armor, but avians can barely wear any?)
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pspeed
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« Reply #14 on: June 28, 2012, 05:53:15 PM »

Is there a possibility for land vehicles as well?

Land vehicles are kind of hard and don't interest me that much.  It would be kind of nice to have carriages and wagons and stuff but part of me also thinks that in a society where air travel is easily accessible that wheeled vehicles might not be that popular.
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