NPC speech algorithms

[Kugrian]

When I try to make an npc, I try to make them as interactive as possible. A big part of this is an attempt to get the players to speak with the npc, rather than kill them for their boots - though I do also have a more than slight intrest in the aforementioned A.L.I.C.E bots.

We have set accents in my world also, so breaking up phrases becomes force of habit.. which does help to get around the language barrier a lot more.

[KaVir]

[Kugrian]

We have a strict ic/ooc policy, so that wouldn't really be possible unfortunatily. The only way to do such a thing with current rules would be to have a player take the newer stranger to an ooc area and explain it too them (of course they'd be helpfiles about it, but how many new players read them? )

[KaVir]

[Kugrian]

We have a hints channel that spews out a hint randomly selected from a list every few minutes, but real time hints just wouldn't work. Thinking about it, could have such a thing in the newbie school, just not in the game proper.

[KaVir]

[Kugrian]

They wouldn't work because the mud owner and admins (of whom I am neither) would not allow it.

[KaVir]

Ah, the joys of bureaucracy

[Ashon]

Why can you, parse the say string for the name of the NPC, and set the current NPC target to that NPC. And as long as the player targets that NPC, they will continue to ramble?

This opens up a lot of things, which can lead into a more interactive social environment with NPC's. It could also simplify commands. give coin (to bartender) gasp (at bartender), etc etc.

[Spazmatic]

One option (my personal favorite and meekly implemented in my toy codebases) is to rely on databases and limited natural language domains. Personally, the products I've achieved result in NPCS sounding very... stupid and non-English-speaking, primarily because I don't have good information-to-speech algorithms, but your mileage may vary. At the very least, using this technique could focus NPC development on a good knowledge base instead of lots of case-by-case coding.

I was first introduced to this idea at the UW, so I'll just post a link to their Natural Language Interface page for people to skim, rather than personally rambling on about PRECISE. Basically, though, for a certain, very useful class of questions, it's possible to map natural language to SQL queries with 100% precision. Outside of that class, it often still performs well.

PRECISE: http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/nli/

[Molly O'Hara]

On a slight tangent - we have a really funny and slightly annoying bird in one of our zones, which is mainly a mimicking parrot. It has a list of about 30 pre-programmed one-liners that it answers with randomly, if you strike up a conversation with it.

But it also picks up any phrase that the player who triggered it says, and adds those to its random list. So naturally the peanut gallery in our mud are occasionally having a field day with it, teaching it to say things like 'Bubba is a total moron.' or 'Boffa is the coolest player in the entire game.' and other 'witty' remarks.

It can be a bit irritating, and it can be a bit spammy, but at least the players have a free choice whether to start it or not. And the things it says are just as witty - or stupid - as the player who said them first.
The bird resets when the mud reboots, so the new phrases don't stay forever either.

[Kjartan]

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[Greggen]

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