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Infinite Games?
Anonymous Coward writes "BBC is running a story on how US scientists are working on improving AI - with potential benefits for coming games.
The system, called Liquid Narrative allows to avoid scripted storylines, and finally gives us, the gamers, full freedom to do whatever we want to do. R. Michael Young, the project coordinator, says:
'Game companies are realising that story telling has a lot of potential that has not been tapped yet.'"
... The Mimesis Project might be interesting as well. Apparently, they are using Unreal Tournament as a test-bed for the AI discussed in the article.
:-)
But I'm still at a loss why they chose UT, of all games, as a "story-telling" AI test-bed.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
elite DID have a 'plot' though.
frontier: elite 2 didn't have any, which was bad, because after you got the gazillion credits the game sort of just died on you, sure you could go exploring but the star systems were mostly alike after you got far enough from the core systems.
frontier: first encounters had a kind of a plot, or an extended quest, which got you a thargoid ship.
the most 'free' game i've played for a while is morrowind, the most boring what comes to freedom nwn..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
They addressed this in the documentation. *from http://mimesis.csc.ncsu.edu/archoverview.html * The second complication dealt with by the MUTS during plan execution arises when the user performs actions within the story world that interfere with the structure of the story plan. Because each action that the user performs might potentially change the world state in a manner that would invalidate some as-yet-unexecuted portion of the narrative plan, the MUTS passes all action commands issued by the user to the Mediator prior to executing the corresponding action's code in the game engine. The Mediator monitors the user's action commands and signals an exception whenever the user attempts to perform an action that would change the world in a way that conflicts with the causal constraints of the story plan.
However, it is possible to have a good story and have some openendness to it. Games like Morrowind and Daggerfall both have a main storyline; however, you can go off in the world and do whatever you want without following the story.
Other games such as Shenmue are not as free, but they still offer a large amount of things you can do. Shenmue is also interesting in that the environment changed around you. It starts off in December and people wear coats and such, but time can pass to it becoming spring and people wear light cloths, tree blossom, etc. There are also many different scenarios you can partake in to accomplish a goal such as going into a bar and fighting a group of people or going into a pool hall and challenge people to a game and get the needed information either way.
The best use of AI in a game that I have seen so far would have to be Seaman for the Sega Dreamcast. It wasn't so much a game as a really cool way to show off AI. In the game you raise a fish/man that grow and eventually will have actual converstations with you. It'd be really interesting to see this work in a game using multiple NPCs.
If these people could expand on this concept and come up with a Morrowind model that spans across a few continents instead of one...
:)
It already exists.
And it's actually called The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. And it's one of my favorite games ever. One order of magnitude above Morrowind in terms of freedom. If you've already covered 75% of Morrowind's map, well, just imagine that after playing Daggerfall for a year I hadn't even been in all the available subregions. To visit every place would take years and years. There are tens of thousands of them.
The plot is great, very complex and political, and very non-linear. There are hundreds of factions, some you can join and some you can't, and all of them will have opinions about you depending on who you serve and who you betray.
Heck, after finishing it, I still kept playing my character again and again because there were things I wanted to investigate after reading about them in books in some of the many libraries you'll find around. Turned out the things in question had indeed been implemented in the game. Wabbajack, Wabbajack, Wabbajack...
Note that most of the game is randomly-generated, so the landscape and day-to-day missions may feel repetitive after a while, but they still somehow manage to feel very engrossing. Possibly because some of them can't be completed. It's a very interesting phase of character development when you're driven to expatriate yourself because you fucked up a mission and started hearing rumors about how much you suck.
Also note that the game is possibly one of the buggiest ever made. But its qualities are otherwise so great that you'll keep coming back to it.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
Games like this already exist.
They are merely few and few between.
Baldur's Gate developed something of a growing narrative, where your actions would generate different behavior from good or evil people depending on what you did.
Black & White was somewhat adaptive.
It's just not exactly easy to code a game with that sort of flexibility.
So they can talk all they want, I'll believe it when I see it.