User Conversation Response Recomendation System

Hi,

As I run around in release 2 i find myself wishing I could fill in the responses that are lacking.

For example some of the poorer citizens in kings port speak of wanting food instead of fish (which is odd since fish is food but i digress). Now if you respond with the terms "fish" or "food" there is no written response.

Now if your user base could fill in the response through the conversation system itself these sorts of small issues would be rectified quickly with little developer effort.

Example:
NPC: I really think we could use food instead of more fish.
user: What kind of food do you need?
NPC: I'm sorry I don't understand.
user: [key] food [response] I think the citizens of kings port could use more vegetables in our diet. All this fish gets a little boring. //with the npc in selected.

Now on the back ground since your already recording all this data. You could just write a script that takes that line puts it into a array and splits out the keyword and response. Then the script can covert it into what ever format your using on the back-end (xml?). A quick copy and past and wala (unless you really want to automate the whole thing.)

Of course if your system ever takes into consideration previously spoken terms you can add on to this as needed.
Example:
[key] boring [response] There is only so much fish cheeks that a man can stomach. [req] food

You could also use this system for spelling mistake flagging.​

 

I approve of having user generated responses, as long as their is a skilled person editing, and approving.

 

this so much. if you are going to force us to talk to these people they should at least respond in some other way than what basically amounts to 'i am error' to 99% of what we say

 

I kind of am already doing this. Let me show you something...



This is the unrecognized keyword list for one NPC in R2 (Anton, the leader of the smugglers, er, "import company"). We can learn quite a bit from this, but for our purposes, we learn that Anton doesn't respond to "Yes", "trapped", "money", etc. So I can pull this report, and do a quick pass, and thus, first:



I went ahead and added a default response to "Yes", but I'm not happy with it. Really what should happen is that Anton's introduction shouldn't really pose a question. Not sure how (or if) that should be rewritten. The next one is pretty clearly people asking after Lauren, encountered earlier in the building....



But I'm not quite happy with this, because it's too spammy. It picked up that I asked about Lauren and trapped, but in this context, the "trapped" answer should be the only response; clearly I already know about Lauren, so Anton doesn't have to respond with that. So a new R3 feature for the conversation system is the ability for designers to flag certain responses as "important". If an important response is triggered, only play that one. So, I've flagged the "trapped" response as important, and the exposition about Lauren not so much. And so:



One more step towards readability. (Also, this breaks the script of certain folks who planned to meander through SotA hitting one key to spam all known keywords at every NPC. I spent a few moments mourning that death, and then quietly moved on.)

Not the only fix planned, by far (next I'll be working on basic memory so that NPCs don't constantly repeat themselves) but wanted to give a quick update. Thanks for your support!

 

As a bonus, by request from irc chat:



how this appears in our editor.

 

I wonder if the system can detect rising frustration. Like a call center speak recognition system when I simple start swearing and / or hitting '0' because it's not giving me what I want.

I'm looking for something like:
"You seem confused: ring the bell, read the book, and light the candle"

As a mercy rule when he's not telling me what I need fast enough.

 

I was just asking about this very thing in the R2 wrap up / R3 preview post Dark Starr did. I agree completely and feel the convo system has a long way to go. It really seems the NPC's don't understand much, even when you respond to them regarding the topic they just spoke of lol.

The devs have plenty of time to work on that though and I just hope it gets some serious attention eventually.

 

When a player isn't hitting the right key words perhaps the NPC can prompt to a start the conversation. For example I've just been talking to Lauren about being trapped and I'm now trying to interact with Anton, after a couple of failed responses I'm making no progress then my recent chat history could be used to identify that I'm on this particular quest line and Anton could say something like "I don't recognise you, there are others like you that are looking for a way to the mainland".

 

I think a we get closer to release the conversation system will be significantly improved I'd say the biggest problem right now is the NPC response dictionary just isn't complete yet but after a few more release tests hopefully it will be a lot more filled in. Also like Lum said various points being flagged as more important than others will help NPCs better guide the conversation instead of you just being completely lost. Also hopefully they'll have ways to prevent to much repeat. Like a timer that says OK NPC you just said that wait 5 minutes before mentioning it again.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

 

Thanks Lum for the follow up,

It seems like you have a pretty good back end system.

I guess my main concern (if you can call it that) is that there will be too many characters for you or the team to fill out the key word responses (non quest or story related of course). Are there any plans to maybe open this up to the community in some small way?

 

I wounder if the 'yes' issue can be caused with a sort of 'memory' maybe the npc instead of having a 'global' keyward list can have keywards associated with specific questions, so if someone says 'yes' to our example npc, it would match that 'yes' as a hit on its intro question list and respond 'Well i'm all ears, what did you want to talk to me about?' but if recieving a 'yes' to other questions no local hits are found and it drops to the generic 'yes' responces for that npc, 'Huh? I'm sorry. I lost track of what we where talking about. Could you reask the question?'

 

A local flag for a previous topic or question?

 

Personally, I liked the way Ultima games did it, where an NPC talked and you were able to click on keywords to open a tree that furthered the conversation. This allowed you to "ask questions" so to speak, so you could get to the info you were looking for.

I understand they're trying to do something new and refreshing here with SotA, but thus far (through release 3), I am not a big fan of the conversation system. I have just run into mostly frustrating conversations with NPC's where they don't seem to understand very basic questions/greetings. I hope that it evolves into awesomeness at some point!

 

Ultima I-VI just had you type a word. And I think through Ultima V (and maybe VI even) they only looked at the four letters of the word. The words didn't have to come in the flow of conversation. You just type the requisite keywords and skip to the end.

Ultima VII - IX had you unlock conversation options and click on them.

I think what is proposed with SotA will depend on how much dialogue writers can produce for all the NPCs. The system they have to track input on the back-end will allow them to expand dialogue and improve it over time. But with so many NPCs in the world, this really does seem like something they should try to crowd source if possible.

They can't easily do this for NPCs that reveal quests and story without spoiling that for the whole community. But I hope Dev+ members will not only be able to design a look and name for their NPC, but also submit meaty dialogue if they so choose.

 

Ultima VII is mostly what I was referring to, although the system in Ultima VI's port to the SNES was also very good. It was similar to Ultima VII, but was very different from the PC version I'm sure. I've not played U6 on the PC, so I'm unfamiliar with that or the Ultima's prior. I was a wee youngin

You're probably right in the fact that the conversation system in this game will depend on a larger dictionary and word base. Whether it is provided by the staff or crowd sourced, we can only hope for a solid refinement by release.

 

I'm really interested in this system, getting the players to actively input the speech is great and adds greatly to immersion. I whole heartedly agree with Richard Garriott about RPG's being too much of just clicking through all the dialogue options without thinking about or reading the text. This is much more fun and engaging.

That is provided of course the system is fleshed out enough to say something relevant in return to your text. To get this depth on all NPC's seems like a monumental task to me, perhaps opening this up to the community as Pinzasso suggested would help? Obviously the inputs we enter would have to be approved by a dev to make sure they were in character and contextual, but if it saves them some time to devote to other features then it seems like a win win

 

I'm really disappointed that people of the town don't know what town they're currently in and continue to ask my if I'm the one confused.