How far are we from this?

[Andail]

This is pretty technical stuff, but hey...

Anyhow, I've always been impressed by the system in Lure of the Temptress, where characters are walking around the settings all by themselves.

From Revolution Games' homepage, they comment on it as follows;

From this came the Virtual Theatre engine. VT allowed in-game characters to wander around the gameworld indepently of each other, living their own lives and doing their own thing. Another feature allowed the player to give direct orders to Helper characters - in this case Ratpouch - who would then go off to perform the task

AGS is basicly another deal...as the player exits a certain room, no scripts can be run in that room anymore.
Will we ever get there, or are the engines so fundamentally different that it's simply not possible?

[Scorpiorus]

Yes, Andail, it's possible. But as you pointed out would require amount of work. You could check that thread: AE There are some interesting specifications you can look at. Also you may wish to take a look at Junc's AI thread.

-Cheers

[juncmodule]

I spent about a month or two putting together a game that was meant to do that but, I got a little overwhelmed. It's a huge project.

Also, check out Scorpiorus' CCS plug-in. I used it in my game Keptosh. Download it and follow the characters around. They follow a certain path.

My second game was meant to "up the par" on this idea and not only make them walk a set path but have that path affected by their mood which would be set by their interactions with other Non-player characters.

Scorpiorus: Is the AE system finished? I never heard anymore about it. Just as that drifted off my interest in making my game did.

Andail: I have been trying to think up an idea for a game that uses this same system on a smaller scale. If you have any ideas and would like to work on a small project together I would be more than happy to. Just keep in mind that SMALL is the all important factor. I had 20 cities and over 60 characters in my Smuggler game. That's what got me in the end. Also, if you just have some ideas and don't want to work on a game, let me know. I am still interested in pursueing this project.

later,
-junc

[Scorpiorus]

Scorpiorus: Is the AE system finished? I never heard anymore about it. Just as that drifted off my interest in making my game did.

No, it's not yet. RickJ was working on the Docbook project therefore Animation Engine was put off till later time.
There are also some technical problems in implemeting several aspects like these room-independent walkings/animations/etc. But they are solvable and the only obstacle for now is to start coding the whole thing.

Yep, making that AI is not an easy task. AE system should help a lot but it still will be a huge work. Making characters to life independenlty each other is not so difficult but it's much more complicated to make them cooperate, form clans or hate each other, so I mean them working as one large organism forming a game world.

Also perfomance question... Having 150 characters walking around would slow down a game. Even if they are in different room CPU still need to calculate every NPC. The AE project was conceived as an open script source but it's slower than a binary version (plugin). On the other hand a script version is portable (dos/win/linux) while plugin one is not.

I haven't seen RickJ during these days, probably he is busy now. I'll ask him if he wants to continue AE(+ACCS) project (btw AE is a part of BlueGui).


-Cheers

[Helm]

Andail: DS is in the middle of figuring out the GUI, which is going to be used in SOL2. It will of course (as far as I can tell) be open source so pester him a bit and he'll finish it for both of us.


Now, the Virtual Theatre engine is another thing...

[DGMacphee]

It is possible.

Although the room scripts are independent of each other, the character scripts are global.

This means that you can set a GlobalInt per character to decide the different actions they perform.

Then, when the main character enters the same room, do a "Before Player Enters Room" interaction and set which action the other character is doing.

For example, lets just say the GlobalInt for one character is 1 for working on a computer and 2 for bouncing a ball in room 14.

When the player character enters room 14 and the GlobalInt for the other character is 2, the player will see the character bouncing a ball.

Let's just say the character then leave for room 15, where GlobalInt is 1 for dancing and 2 for sleeping.

Let's say the player enters room 15 and GlobalInt is 1 -- the player will see the character dancing.

The character's room and other actions can set in the global script's Repeatedly Execute using "character[DUDE].room = 14", etc

This is a rough idea, but improve upon it if you can.

[RickJ]

I'll be picking up the animation engine near the end of July.  I am starting a new consulting project that will pretty much consume the computer programming part of my brain.  

I had started on this a while back but as Scrop says it's a pretty big task.  It requires that I carry a bunch of stuff around in my head while the work is in progress.  I do plan on finishing this and will realse it open source.   I will be thrilled if people want to use it.