Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[itisnotlogical]

There was Facade, a game where you play the friend of a couple that's having difficulties. They're both played by chatbots and respond to things you type, as well as the limited number of physical actions the game allows. The realism of the result largely depends on luck and your own suspension of disbelief. Sometimes it reacts in a really coherent, specific manner to something you said. Other times... not so much. It takes a few tries to get a "good" run, and I've never gotten an ending other than kicked out of the apartment.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

There was Facade, a game where you play the friend of a couple that's having difficulties. They're both played by chatbots and respond to things you type, as well as the limited number of physical actions the game allows. The realism of the result largely depends on luck and your own suspension of disbelief. Sometimes it reacts in a really coherent, specific manner to something you said. Other times... not so much. It takes a few tries to get a "good" run, and I've never gotten an ending other than kicked out of the apartment.

Neat, but that was not what I had meant, though I can see it may have been unclear.  What I meant is if someone had made a game where the written dialogue was read by current day text-to-speech programs and justified the robotic nature of the programs by having the setting have the characters being robots.

[SeriousConcentrate]

5086 (or something like that) may be what you're looking for? I don't think it has procedural dialogue or anything, but it does do the text to speech because robots thing iirc.

[Rolan7]

Tactics games where line of sight is a really big deal, but there's no indication of what you'll be able to see/fire on from a given point.
X-COM, XCOM, UFO:ET, UFO, classic Fallout...

UFO:Extraterrestrials mitigated this by including a wonderful fan modpack which includes a feature, which should be in all LoS tactics games, to simply mouse over a square to highlight enemies that would be shootable from there.
Pretty sure there's a mod for that in XCOM, too, but UFO:ET gets points for hiring the mod maker and including the functionality in the base game.
X-COM it was particularly frustrating because *often* a soldier could see an alien, yet didn't have LoF to shoot.  The reasons are complicated as they are silly, and vaguely impressive (they were doing ray-tracing from a specific spot on the soldier where the gun was held).  Also the alien could often have LoF on the soldier but not vice versa.
The UFO AfterX series (unrelated to UFO:ET) actually did this best, I think.  If a soldier could see a target, but something was blocking the shot, they'd *lean*.  Animated and everything.  They still needed a clear shot, they were just willing to work for it.
In XCOM, of course, LoS is a complete fuckfest.  But at least it's generous, letting you shoot through floors and walls... usually...  Of course, that means that hidden thinman will take a reaction shot on the VIP through two walls.  Maybe.

Anyway, just venting about LoS in... Fallout Tactics, ironically.  I don't understand it enough yet to properly rant about, but the squashed isometric view and slight height differences are making it pretty tough.  Not to mention all the cover.  I think it's "fair", but it's also hard to predict.  And enemies are overwatch-happy, which even triggers on crouching or standing up, so there's a significant cost for each mistake.

Lastly, a different pet peeve...  The need to minmax.  I love it and hate it.
This is the FIRST MISSION.  My main character has an agility of 5 (average) and tagged small guns (very unoptimal for the late game).  He's also Good Natured and Gifted, which lower gun skill, but it's still 25%...
He has literally a 0% chance to hit a mission 1 raider at point blank range, with an uzi.  That's just dumb.

[miauw62]

Give it time.

Eventually, the enemy dialog will be a combination of a sanity checked markov chain, and realtime voice synth (that is actually worth a shit).  After that, it will have some rudimentary neural net ai running behind it so that the NPCs actually CAN, Actually banter. (semi-randomness from the markov generator feedstock, coupled with a NN AI that can determine meaning, and use that meaning to weight its own markov chain output before sending it to the sanitizer for proper gramatical and sentence structure.) Such AIs would have some "personality" variables for things they are programmed to like, dislike, know about, etc, that would dramatically shape their output streams and interaction with other NPCs.  (Think something on par with IBM Watson, coupled with some preset personality profile data)

It will still have plenty of warts, but would be better than the Russian stalkers shouting "A Nu! CHeeky breeky!" at you every time they see you in stalker.

why would you generate dialogue with a markov chain and then try to impart meaning on it with a neural network? that seems ridiculously complex when you could just not use markov chains in the first place. especially since none of this is supposed to evolve at all, a markov chain isnt useful. just train a neural network on a set of your choice and use that to generate the text??

[Neonivek]

Anti-fun difficulty settings

Ok this is hard for me to give examples but for a few games there are difficulty settings and you can make the game tougher... But at the same time you end up making the game a lot less fun. Typically this is because the difficulty gives enemies huge piles of health. Examples include

-Freedom Force Vs. The Third Reich: Hard is actually a very fun difficulty setting... Any higher and you will be bored as enemies have HP upon HP.
-Magicka 2: Hard gives enemies faast regenerating health bars and HP up the wazoo. When Magicka works best when it is brisk you can see the problem here.
-Rune Factory: Enemies do a lot of damage all of a sudden... Doesn't seem too bad right? Except there is a defense skill that only increases as you take damage... and you absolutely cannot take damage on hard because you will die in moments.
-One of the Harvest moon games: The Economy is just completely messed up on any difficulty but easy. Things cost too much, things sell for too little, you will be poor for well over a year.
-Rainbow Six: Enemies get the shooting ability of the freeken heavens! I know it is a test of skill but they aren't even human at that point. Be tough, but I am against terrorists... Not Billy the Kid in an android body.

At least in theory games should be AS fun or MORE fun the harder you put it preferences holding... or at least there shouldn't be a quality dip from going to hard.

Easy sort of falls into this nebulous place... because a lot of the time people who turn the difficulty down want less engagement. So I can't comment on that too too much.

[SeriousConcentrate]

Bullet sponge enemies are never fun.

[wierd]

Give it time.

Eventually, the enemy dialog will be a combination of a sanity checked markov chain, and realtime voice synth (that is actually worth a shit).  After that, it will have some rudimentary neural net ai running behind it so that the NPCs actually CAN, Actually banter. (semi-randomness from the markov generator feedstock, coupled with a NN AI that can determine meaning, and use that meaning to weight its own markov chain output before sending it to the sanitizer for proper gramatical and sentence structure.) Such AIs would have some "personality" variables for things they are programmed to like, dislike, know about, etc, that would dramatically shape their output streams and interaction with other NPCs.  (Think something on par with IBM Watson, coupled with some preset personality profile data)

It will still have plenty of warts, but would be better than the Russian stalkers shouting "A Nu! CHeeky breeky!" at you every time they see you in stalker.

why would you generate dialogue with a markov chain and then try to impart meaning on it with a neural network? that seems ridiculously complex when you could just not use markov chains in the first place. especially since none of this is supposed to evolve at all, a markov chain isnt useful. just train a neural network on a set of your choice and use that to generate the text??

Because the next iteration after that is a combination of speech-to-text dictation based natural language interaction with the NPCs.

And the goal was to remove boring, repetitive dialog, and give a better illusion of natural dialog. The combination would throw in some randomness from the markov chain, which would then get filtered by the NN and the sanity checker. This would result in far higher degrees of variation in dialog, but with similar meanings. The markov chain set could be used to give an NPC a specific mannerism as well, by weighting the word choices used in the training set. That would make it easier to make the AI sound like yoda, if you wanted, for instance.

[Tawa]

One thing I've noticed I really dislike is when a game has a lot of potential for witty or charming fluff, immersive gameplay, and the like, but then the gameplay turns out to be based around bizarre or unintuitive strategies completely divorced from the fluff.

What immediately jumps to mind for me is Civilization II (admittedly the only Civ game I've ever played.) It's a pretty fun strategy game, but practically the entire strategy of the game is built around arbitrary game mechanics and statistics that don't really have very much to do with history or any kind of strategy that's applicable outside the game, like building a million cities to spam units, or skipping entire branches of tech trees and bypassing units wholesale because the next one down the line is more powerful.

[Neonivek]

Meta solutions

Alright this is FAIRLY rare but there are two examples of this I can draw.

Basically this is anytime a game has a solution to a problem that cannot be done with ingame knowledge or mechanics.

Leisure Suit Larry: There is a slot machine you need to play to earn a lot of money... While you can theoretically win... You are actually expected to save and load continuously until you win enough money

The Secret World: Several quests actually require you to go onto the internet and look up the solution (specifically... like if they list a bible verse you need to look up what it is to solve the problem)... Now this isn't Baaaad... But it just rubs me the wrong way because everything I do in real life feels entirely separate from the actual game.

Which is why it peaves me... I am the player but while I am controlling the character... they are still a character in that narrative. Anything I personally do outside the game or in the menus or anything like that isn't something they do (with few notable exceptions)

[Rolan7]

That's dumb, they could easily include an in-game Bible...
I remember an old (never finished?) OS/2 adventure game by Stardock called Avarice which had a well-stocked library.  Like, it had a bunch of Project Gutenberg books in, and you could just read them in-game.  At the time I thought that was amazing...  Still seems pretty nifty.

[Chiefwaffles]

Anti-fun difficulty settings

AkA: The Division
Goddamn bullet sponges.

That's dumb, they could easily include an in-game Bible...

The problem with this is that it still harms immersion and gameplay.
Why bother? You're forcing the player to interrupt their experience to look up something, regardless of whether that thing is accessible inside the game or outside. What's the point of asking the player this when it adds nothing to the game?
If it's there to make a point, why not just make the character know it? Why not have the NPC say "Like the bible said ...", instead of asking you? Why force the player to interrupt their experience?

[SeriousConcentrate]

...Because it's a puzzle/part of a puzzle? Having an NPC tell you the answer kinda misses the whole point.

[Neonivek]

It depends on the type of game Chiefwaffles.

If you are playing Devil May Cry... and suddenly you need to find a bible verse... and then need to go to an ingame bible and find the verse... Yeah.

If this is a kind of puzzle or point and click... Or game with a heavy focus on puzzles and mystery (like an RPG)... It really could work.

As long as it doesn't work against the flow of the game.

[Chiefwaffles]

Well, yeah.
I'm mostly thinking about like a "Pause menu -> Codex -> [Relevant Document]" or conveniently finding the document nearby.

Having to find the ingame bible kind of eliminates the point, though. Now you're just camouflaging a regular mechanic. If I say "stranger, I desperately need this bible verse but it's inside Mr. Evil's dungeon!'", then I'm just adding an unneeded layer of tedium (memorizing/writing down the needed lines/phrases/verses/etc.) to an otherwise normal quest.
But it can work. It just usually doesn't.

@SeriousConcentrate:
But the stuff I was talking about wouldn't be part of a puzzle.
If your "puzzle" is "go look at this, memorize this line, then repeat it to me", it's not a puzzle. It's just unnecessary tedium that can be streamlined with no loss. And I know some people think "streamline" is a bad word, but it's really not.