Don’t know if anyone recals but around a year ago I said that I was doing a master’s thesis and I was implementing the demo with Unity.
The title of the thesis is Social Behaviour in Non-Player Characters for Role-Playing Games.
There are two versions of the scenario (which is the market). The first one is a simple market (i.e. like in today’s games, you buy items) and the second version has a simple social behaviour between the characters. For example, they can tell you who has some item (if they know it), and their responses will be based on their personalities and the relationship with the other characters.
The keys to play the game are explained in the Readme inside the folder. You .app needs to be next to the knowledge folder!
There are a few glitches that I’m aware of, like a problem with rotation that sometimes jumps for some reason… There must be a problem with the way I’m using the rotate around function.
Any feedback is welcomed. Hope you find it a least a bit interesting
Regards,
Afonso
PS: Try to use a resolution like 800x600 or 1024x786. I didn’t do very dynamic dialogs, so there could be a chance that text may overlay on lower resolutions!
“What, no tip?” Heh, pretty clever. I especially liked the cartoon styled text bubble over the characters, haven’t seen that done in a Unity game before.
If one of these guys dosent fess up where to find a freakin thruster Im gonna …
Oh wait -my disbelief was suspended for a moment there. Well done Nafonso, those characters definately give the experience depth, and I think my approach to ai will change as a result of testing this…
Im just so used to those guys giving me the run and gun treatment…the only thing that wouldve given each a bit more identity wouldve been changing the colour of their textures? I guess that would have circumvented your goal perhaps…
Thanks for the feedback. The balloons were done with a little help of omnigraffle.
As for the colors, you are right, I’m going to have to make the characters more distinguishable, because the user testing will ask somethings about the characters.
The inventory was a work in progress. It was supposed to make a purchase like in today’s RPGs with drag&drop items, but as soon as I saw that I wouldn’t have time to continue down that path, I had to start chopping things down. I only left it there because it allows players to see what they bought and to see my crappy art skills in modo!
The reason why it is so difficult to buy thrusters is because in the beginning there aren’t any! The two characters that walk around buy and sell items to the merchants, and will eventually bring thrusters. The idea is that you ask around, nobody has, then eventually somebody will say to you “hey, just got the thruster you were asking about.” I acknowledge it may be a bit frustrating if the random numbers don’t appear really random in the beginning. I’ll probably make a timer that triggers all the objects be available after N minutes.
that works well nafonso - its cool to see something like this in unity ; )
two things:
-i would move the NPC talk area down to the bottom right of the screen (or anywhere closer to the player talk area) - its a long way for your eyes to travel to see the response to your questions and also, its more natural to have it either to the right or below as most languages read that way.
-i rushed over to beat one of the NPCs to a merchant he just pushed up behind me - when i was done talking it was a bit hard to get out of there. it would be cool if there was a ‘rudeness’ factor where the NPCs could react differently if you cut them in line etc.
are you planning on developing this more in the future?
I understand what you mean, but right now I don’t have any time left. Have to start user evaluation and continue to write the document.
Yes, there are some flaws, e.g. I’m using physics add translations, which can give bad collisions. As time was shorting out I decided to just leave it as it is.
Right now I’m in kind of a limbo… I will either go into a Phd or I’ll have to go work on Information Systems (and leave the games to hobby at least for a while). If I start the Phd I’ll continue this work, and explore the dynamic side of these relationships. At the moment they are static (i.e. A always likes B), the continuation was to create dynamism (e.g. A likes B, but I could influence B in to start not liking A), perhaps even introduce things like what you mentioned, i.e. not only dialogs, but actions would influence the social relations.
Its interesting. I like the dynamic market system but if you are focusing on realistic AI, I would have added a few more things like bumping into people causing them to talk to you and sellers advertising what they have even if you don’t talk to them. Adding chit chat conversation items that can end up changing peoples relationships with you and eachother would be interesting. Also, adding names over people’s heads would help me get less confused. But it is nice so far.
I understand what you are saying, but you need to realise that there is a limited amount of time to do stuff .
I have lots of ideas on how to improve AI, this is just one of them, and I chose it because it is the basis for others and because no game implements it. If I had time I’d like to implement lots of other stuff, lets see what the future brings .
As for the names, you’re right, lets see how people do in the evaluation tests. If they can’t keep track of the people, I’ll have to do something like the talk balloons with their names.
that sounds like fun - ever since i read about PARRY* (and then ELIZA of course) when i was a kid i’ve been interested in stuff like that - unfortunately though i’m not much of a student - i think its cool you’re using unity for such an acedemic pursuit ; )
I heard about those two (specially eliza, didn’t recall parry) some time ago (I believe that it was in a multi-agent systems course), although that’s not quite what I’m doing. My work is more based on the relations and the “laws of attraction” between the characters.
In terms of conversation, one game that was very nice was Façade (http://www.interactivestory.net/).
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