Is there going to be dialogue?

[Martyn van Buren]

What is NPC interaction going to be like?  I'm used to talking to characters in adventure games, but I can't really imagine how you could have conversations with procedurally-generated characters.  I think I'd feel weird killing off a fortress of baddies if I didn't know that he was stealing a little girl's chickens or something.  On the other hand, I've played plenty of games where you have exactly the same conversation with the shopkeeper every time you want to buy a healing potion or fly your zeppelin to another island, so I guess our tolerance for reused dialogue must be pretty high.

[x4000]

There is plenty of dialogue, but it's not interactive in the western RPG sense -- it's really monologue in the JRPG style.  But anyway, finding out what NPCs want and choosing to help them or not is a huge part of this game, and that obviously requires more than a bit of text.   Also there are Space Rangers 2 style "text quests" that are interactive, but those aren't with every NPC or even close.

[BobTheJanitor]

I've never been a fan of the dialogue tree style of game, to be honest. It seems somehow more contrived than just putting the dialogue on rails and throwing it at you. The ME style 'nice response' 'standard response' 'jerk response' is just silly to me. Plus, it always makes me feel like I might be missing something good because I didn't pick the best response to get the most entertaining dialogue. I'd rather know that I'm always getting the best text out of it, because I didn't have any other choices. And with dialogue tree systems you end up having to go back and retread the same dialogue so you can try some other branch of the tree, in case you missed something there. That's probably the worst of all.

[x4000]

I've never been a fan of the dialogue tree style of game, to be honest. It seems somehow more contrived than just putting the dialogue on rails and throwing it at you. The ME style 'nice response' 'standard response' 'jerk response' is just silly to me.

Wow, it's like you pulled the words right out of my brain.

Plus, it always makes me feel like I might be missing something good because I didn't pick the best response to get the most entertaining dialogue. I'd rather know that I'm always getting the best text out of it, because I didn't have any other choices. And with dialogue tree systems you end up having to go back and retread the same dialogue so you can try some other branch of the tree, in case you missed something there. That's probably the worst of all.

And the hits keep on rolling -- I feel the same.

[Magos Mechanicus]

I for one don't consider static-NPC-monologue and single-way-to-progress games like the Zelda series to be role playing games proper any more than I consider Mario to be one. Most role playing games may have statistics-driven combat mechanics, but don't confuse that with what role playing games are - fundamentally a role playing game is a way to have people create and play out a story together. In face-to-face RP such as tabletop or LARP, between people, like a play. In computer role playing games, between a player and simulations made by the game's designers.

Dialogue trees can be done shallowly ("Asshole/neutral/nice response" with nothing to distinguish their outcomes), but are pretty much required to allow players to define their own role, make consequential choices in NPC interaction and so on and have the game world actually react to that. Especially for games like Mass Effect or Planescape: Torment where NPC interaction is (IMO) the actual core game experience, building supporting mechanics around this makes a lot of sense to me.

That's not a knock on the direction AVwW is going, though - its greater focus on the persistent world, fulfilling hopes and so on should make for other ways to characterize, and with those historical mechanics we keep hearing about I could see a whole tapestry of interwoven stories being created over a player's many lives.

[Martyn van Buren]

Cool.  The benchmark I was thinking of was Zelda; there isn't much there, but it would still be weird to run around Hyrule if the people had absolutely nothing to say.  So how do you put dialogue in a procedurally-generated game?  Is every NPC who wants something going to say the same thing with a different object's name, or are there more sophisticated tricks than that?

[x4000]

Zelda is one of my benchmarks, but we want more dialogue than that. Similar brevity to snes RPGs, which are rather poetic in their short wording. That said: this game is vaguely rpg-like in a few ways, but it's definitely not an rpg. Magos is quit right on the core foci here.

In terms of how we handle dialogue variance: external XML files that are randomized and which players can submit lines for. So the game decides that a character will have a gruff bit of text -- it looks in te XML file for gruff text, finds a line a random, fills in any variables, and shows it to the player. Same if the character needs to express needing some resource, needing you to kill something, needing you to scout around the settlement, or whatever.

The early beta versions will be limited to whatever we put in pre-beta of course. But we should be able to get some reasonable variance. Our hope, however, is that players will also take an interest in submitting lines that we can use in the official builds of the game. Totally optional, of course, but our experience has been that players wan more ways to contribute, not fewer. This game will be littered with them!

[Flatfingers]

This sounds like a great opportunity for motivated fans to help add to the flavor of the game, as well as to help fill in some of the easier-to-create content, allowing the developers to focus on the hard things. Very nice!

I look forward to seeing the list of conversational input flags and variables -- just how "creative" will text authors be able to be?

Oh, and it would be great if someone could review all the text files for spelling/grammar before the actual launch. It might sound trivial to some gamers, but I use text quality as a measure of whether a game's developers really cared about completely polishing the product they're offering to sell to me.

I'm willing and able to proofread if that would be helpful.

Finally, I note that if NPC text is in external XML files, are all text strings also in external resource files? That would go a long way toward allowing AVWW to be localized for international sales. Any thoughts on this?

[x4000]

At the moment I'm planning on putting our PR guy Erik in charge of proofing submissions; some things won't even be appropriate to include, or might include references that could be copyright dubious to other parties, or just not matching the general tone of the game, or whatever.  That stuff is fine for mods, which players are free to post as they like, but anything that goes into the official game gets vetted and very likely subtly edited by us.  That said, depending on the volume, I imagine that Erik wouldn't mind some help on that.

In terms of the conversational flags and variables, that's honestly still being worked out.  We have a few early example cases, but mostly we've been focused on the actual mechanics of the hopes and needs, rather than on the wording to go with.  Not that the wording isn't important, but when the mechanics change that has a good chance of invalidating all the wording that came before, so we try to front-load the mechanics.  I imagine this will also grow some during beta, as players request things we hadn't thought of, etc.

And yes, all text strings are in external XML files, as with AI War, Tidalis, etc.  AI War and Tidalis have been both localized to German, and AI War also to Russian, for regional retail.  We don't tend to do localization for digital sales because our games have a lot of text (both AI War and Tidalis have well more than a game normally would), and worse yet these are frequently updated.  So you wind up with a lot of challenges there, and we've found it's generally only worthwhile to do if a publisher does it for us and foots the bill (and is able to offer front-line support in the language in question; we wouldn't want to be unable to support customers that don't speak the same language but have some issue).

In the case of AI War the problem is compounded by the massive wiki that is needed for really being able to fully wrap your arms around the game; translating that would double or triple the amount of text, and it changes even more frequently.  With AVWW, my ardent hope is that there isn't a need for such an exhaustive wiki, though if someone wants to create something like the minecraft wiki I'm sure there will be folks who are very appreciative.

Anyway... so we'll see where we wind up, and how popular the game really gets, and all that sort of thing.  Obviously if there are buckets of money floating around, why not localize, etc.  This is a much less niche game than either of our other two titles, so who knows?  But I'm certainly not counting on that, so for the moment localization isn't really on my radar, although we're doing things in a manner that make it localization-ready just in case.  We had to retrofit AI War 2.0 for localization-readiness, and I don't ever want to have to do that again, heh.

[Nice Save]

+1 volunteer for proofreading.

I get pretty pedantic about spelling and grammar, one of the few things I would ever consider going back to paper books for.

[x4000]

Keith, Erik, myself, and my wife are all super-anal writers, as well.  So we've got lots of eyes, especially when combined with awesomely helpful players, which is just what we need!

[Nalgas]

Similar brevity to snes RPGs, which are rather poetic in their short wording.

It won't have quite the same effect unless it's also semi-awkwardly translated from Japanese to English while having to work within both memory and screen space limits.  Heh.

[x4000]

Similar brevity to snes RPGs, which are rather poetic in their short wording.

It won't have quite the same effect unless it's also semi-awkwardly translated from Japanese to English while having to work within both memory and screen space limits.  Heh.

Well, we can imitate it somewhat, but yeah.  I miss the Ted Woolsey translations. 

[zebramatt]

+1 volunteer for proofreading.

I get pretty pedantic about spelling and grammar, one of the few things I would ever consider going back to paper books for.

As an avid reader of both paper and e-books, my experience thus far has been about the same in terms of grammatical and spelling errors.

Which is to say, both media possess a spattering of same, in about equal measure.

Formatting can be more of an issue in e-books, mind.

[Nice Save]

+1 volunteer for proofreading.

I get pretty pedantic about spelling and grammar, one of the few things I would ever consider going back to paper books for.

As an avid reader of both paper and e-books, my experience thus far has been about the same in terms of grammatical and spelling errors.

Which is to say, both media possess a spattering of same, in about equal measure.

Formatting can be more of an issue in e-books, mind.

I've found that different sources of e-books seem to come with different issues. Older books that have been dug out of the files and transferred to digital tend to come with formatting errors, while books released only in digital format are usually well-formatted but not as well edited for spelling and grammar. New releases in both paper and digital are usually the highest quality in both.

Meanwhile, on topic...

In terms of how we handle dialogue variance: external XML files that are randomized and which players can submit lines for. So the game decides that a character will have a gruff bit of text -- it looks in te XML file for gruff text, finds a line a random, fills in any variables, and shows it to the player. Same if the character needs to express needing some resource, needing you to kill something, needing you to scout around the settlement, or whatever.

Will it be only complete lines that are available to be picked or will there be a system that picks phrases and mixes them in to make a sentence?

For example, when telling you to go somewhere and kill something, you could have different phrases for 'here's the plan', 'go here', 'this is the target', 'kill it'

e.g.
'Right, there's a hut nearby, Big Dave the Dirty Bandit is there, get rid of him.'

'We need you to find Deathcave, Little Dave the Friendly Dragon terrorizes the area around it, vanquish this foe and you shall be rewarded!'

'Right, find Deathcave, Medium Dave the Faceless is there,  vanquish this foe and you shall be rewarded!'

While this sort of thing is probably way too much work to pull off in real life, I think it would really help keep the world of AVWW fresh for a lot longer, which (in my opinion) is very important when you are talking in terms of thousands of hours in game.

'A particular outlaw has been causing us much hardship. Pregnantkindle is a short walk to the northeast. Seek this place and kill Obler Plannddonkeys the Axeman.'