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NPCS - will who you are matter to them?


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Will they react to who you are?, something that has always bothered me in gaming is that no one cares about WHO the player is. This is an objectively bad example but I think it illustrates my point so here goes: in skyrim a healer is expected to murderise a dragon with the same unadulterated badassery that an angry man with a big sword is. I know, it's a terrible example, different genre, different everything, it couldn't make allowances for the players RP like that without completely derailing it's story but as I said, it gets the point across. Also a really shallow game now that I think back on it in but thats unrelated.

 

So to PZ, an npc is on a looting run turns a corner and comes face to face with the/a player character, in scenario A, that player character is a military type, well armed and trained to use said armament, a clear and obvious threat but also possible asset. In scenario B player character is a scared bar-maid or an overweight office dude with nothing but a kitchen knife, not really a threat, but probably also useless. Will they react differently to you depending on who you are, on what and who they're presented with?. 

 

A well armed survivor, clearly trained and doing well vs a barely scraping by no body with nothing who is very much NOT doing well. I'd certainly be twitchier around the former than the latter, possibly ignoring bar-maid/office bloke altogether (and get knifed in the back?) but military would stop me in my tracks. So if they find you huddled in a closet with nothing will they react differently to you than if they find you atop a mountain of zombie corpses smoking a joint?.

 

I do occasionally roleplay dangerously inept characters that an npc might well find huddled in a closet and it would epic if the AI rolled with that. 

 

 

 

 

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Depending on how complex the NPC logic becomes, I would think something like that behavior could be incorporated. I just hope the NPCs get designed to adapt to the player's prolong gameplay, that it adapts to situations to avoid the feeling of things being scripted or queued. How that gets done within the game is beyond me but I would suspect it's going to be much more complex than just a series of IF/THEN statements and lines of dialogue...

 

What I would personally love to see is an AI that adapts in the sense of assessing progress and in some situations, depending on situations, makes actual decisions on its own, such as deciding to form its own faction(s) or go loot local homes and when it runs into conflicts or gets hurt, actually goes and gets medicine or bandages. Being in your base out in the woods after being alive for a year or two, you'd likely have more than one person in a single base. Through time, you go through ups and downs whereby run-ins with other factions are bound to occur, either from trade disputes or resource wars. Do those factions have a base? Do they progress in the same sense that the player does? Are they looting local homes the same way you are in your area and thereby affecting your access to resources? All of these kinds of dynamics would be things I'd hope to see accounted for with any NPC system they come up with. In an actual real-world scenario where a zombie apocalypse might happen (pretending it could, of course), I'd envision situations arising where any remaining official government bodies from the old world would try to come in and reestablish social order and in some situations, I'd expect those efforts to be rejected by those who have established their own new world societies which have their own new governance. The result would obviously consist of skirmishes and conflicts... So with that in mind, I can see the government in the game existing as another separate faction, so-to-speak, that the player and or NPCs would have to decide how to handle just like they would determine with each other.

 

Too many games nowadays lack replayability in the sense that they create a lead-up to an ending state without incorporating experiential evolution. I can't think of a single game that actually does something like this but the overall thing I'm trying to stress here is perhaps better described with the old Maxis games in mind: when you think of experiential evolution, think "The Sims" being incorporated into "Sim Town" which is then incorporated into "Sim City," and so on. Micro-to-macro, all being playable at all levels. If you want to play from a micro-level, you'd zoom down into "The Sims" perspective to run around swatting at zombies and raiding homes for loot. Zoom out to the "Sim Town" layer to assess faction-level state, coordinate with allies things ranging from trade routes to planning strikes against opposing faction boundaries, but then zoom out even more to the "Sim City" level in an effort to plan forays into other cities, etc. Of course, this is easier said than done and I doubt the developers have plans on taking this game that far. But it'd be awesome if they ever did. Minecraft comes close to this kind of system except that it's just too isolated or lonely. I mean, once you've built a single castle or mined all the diamonds you can find, everything thereafter is boring and monotonous. It helps to have friends with various add-ons like RLCraft, sure, but even then, there's no real sense of a wider ongoing world outside of your server. This phenomenon could be fixed if a game type mechanic existed in every Minecraft world that incorporated rare and randomly-generated portals the players could discover and control that connect the respective world to other players' servers. For example, imagine how much fun it would be to be down in some cavern or exploring some old ruin only to stumble across am active portal that, once used, would take you to a different server that other players are playing on? The mechanic I envision would allow you to deconstruct the portal the same way you do with any other blocks except that these blocks, when rebuilt, would allow you to relocate the portal but when rebuilt, reestablish that same portal path to that same server it randomly got assigned to (thereby making it possible to have actual trade routes). From there, you could could form alliances, establish real highways, and create honest-to-god towns and cities with it all being maintained and operated with players, currencies, goods... It'd be great and wouldn't be that difficult to do as ways exist through add-ons to have actual portals in the game like this except that nothing is centralized: you'd need a central repository of Mojang-approved gaming servers for the randomly-generated portals to tap into whenever it generates the portals.  Anyway, the point in all this rambling is that this would constitute my idea of experiential evolution or ongoing replayability and to add something along that same vein in PZ via things like NPCs, factions, micro-to-macro models would be amazing.

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26 minutes ago, Wolf_22 said:

Depending on how complex the NPC logic becomes, I would think something like that behavior could be incorporated. I just hope the NPCs get designed to adapt to the player's prolong gameplay, that it adapts to situations to avoid the feeling of things being scripted or queued. How that gets done within the game is beyond me but I would suspect it's going to be much more complex than just a series of IF/THEN statements and lines of dialogue...

 

What I would personally love to see is an AI that adapts in the sense of assessing progress and in some situations, depending on situations, makes actual decisions on its own, such as deciding to form its own faction(s) or go loot local homes and when it runs into conflicts or gets hurt, actually goes and gets medicine or bandages. Being in your base out in the woods after being alive for a year or two, you'd likely have more than one person in a single base. Through time, you go through ups and downs whereby run-ins with other factions are bound to occur, either from trade disputes or resource wars. Do those factions have a base? Do they progress in the same sense that the player does? Are they looting local homes the same way you are in your area and thereby affecting your access to resources? All of these kinds of dynamics would be things I'd hope to see accounted for with any NPC system they come up with. In an actual real-world scenario where a zombie apocalypse might happen (pretending it could, of course), I'd envision situations arising where any remaining official government bodies from the old world would try to come in and reestablish social order and in some situations, I'd expect those efforts to be rejected by those who have established their own new world societies which have their own new governance. The result would obviously consist of skirmishes and conflicts... So with that in mind, I can see the government in the game existing as another separate faction, so-to-speak, that the player and or NPCs would have to decide how to handle just like they would determine with each other.

 

Too many games nowadays lack replayability in the sense that they create a lead-up to an ending state without incorporating experiential evolution. I can't think of a single game that actually does something like this but the overall thing I'm trying to stress here is perhaps better described with the old Maxis games in mind: when you think of experiential evolution, think "The Sims" being incorporated into "Sim Town" which is then incorporated into "Sim City," and so on. Micro-to-macro, all being playable at all levels. If you want to play from a micro-level, you'd zoom down into "The Sims" perspective to run around swatting at zombies and raiding homes for loot. Zoom out to the "Sim Town" layer to assess faction-level state, coordinate with allies things ranging from trade routes to planning strikes against opposing faction boundaries, but then zoom out even more to the "Sim City" level in an effort to plan forays into other cities, etc. Of course, this is easier said than done and I doubt the developers have plans on taking this game that far. But it'd be awesome if they ever did. Minecraft comes close to this kind of system except that it's just too isolated or lonely. I mean, once you've built a single castle or mined all the diamonds you can find, everything thereafter is boring and monotonous. It helps to have friends with various add-ons like RLCraft, sure, but even then, there's no real sense of a wider ongoing world outside of your server. This phenomenon could be fixed if a game type mechanic existed in every Minecraft world that incorporated rare and randomly-generated portals the players could discover and control that connect the respective world to other players' servers. For example, imagine how much fun it would be to be down in some cavern or exploring some old ruin only to stumble across am active portal that, once used, would take you to a different server that other players are playing on? The mechanic I envision would allow you to deconstruct the portal the same way you do with any other blocks except that these blocks, when rebuilt, would allow you to relocate the portal but when rebuilt, reestablish that same portal path to that same server it randomly got assigned to (thereby making it possible to have actual trade routes). From there, you could could form alliances, establish real highways, and create honest-to-god towns and cities with it all being maintained and operated with players, currencies, goods... It'd be great and wouldn't be that difficult to do as ways exist through add-ons to have actual portals in the game like this except that nothing is centralized: you'd need a central repository of Mojang-approved gaming servers for the randomly-generated portals to tap into whenever it generates the portals.  Anyway, the point in all this rambling is that this would constitute my idea of experiential evolution or ongoing replayability and to add something along that same vein in PZ via things like NPCs, factions, micro-to-macro models would be amazing.

I don't have the time to go into the details of everything you've mentioned unfortunately or talk about them but in case you haven't seen it:

 

Capture3.PNG

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On 6/2/2021 at 10:22 AM, MadDan2013 said:

I don't have the time to go into the details of everything you've mentioned unfortunately or talk about them but in case you haven't seen it:

 

Capture3.PNG

 

Thanks, and yeah, I came across that awhile back and it's one of the reasons I worded things the way I did (hoping someone like you might bat an eyelash to my remarks and maybe confirm that the kind of AI I was thinking of is on an agenda to be worked on at some point). I know I speak for everyone when I say that I can't wait for it. I have no doubt that NPCs will revolutionize the experiences players get from this game.

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33 minutes ago, Wolf_22 said:

 

Thanks, and yeah, I came across that awhile back and it's one of the reasons I worded things the way I did (hoping someone like you might bat an eyelash to my remarks and maybe confirm that the kind of AI I was thinking of is on an agenda to be worked on at some point). I know I speak for everyone when I say that I can't wait for it. I have no doubt that NPCs will revolutionize the experiences players get from this game.

I'm not sure how long you have been around but there's a good bit more information over the years available too.

This is one of them which talks about behaviour trees, and a video from a blog that has some gameplay of them back in the day "playing" the game:

https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ChrisSimpson/20140717/221339/Behavior_trees_for_AI_How_they_work.php

 

And while they're old, they're still relevant to the basic behaviour they'll have which already is at a much higher level than the mods have due to the behaviour trees.

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Presumably they are supposed to care. There actually used to be some traits that were basically free points, because they would really only have an effect with NPCs. Stuff like personality traits, so I can see all those coming back once NPCs are in and I think it also paints a clear picture that they will definitely care about what kind of person you are. I'd imagine that in the instance of meeting up with one while out looting it will also carry with it a certain randomness based on the particular NPCs traits. Maybe they are by default hostile or maybe they will be a little more leery of you and things like that.

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  • 2 weeks later...

hi every one 

i am new in here but i play this game for a long time but i never saw a npc in game :( and i have so many question like why we cant create a bow or crossbow when we can create a spear !!

when there is a lot of wood present and we dont have any forge or metal work and i dont know why there is no katana in anywhere ! 

who should i tell to create these things and put it in the game ??  

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Having NPCs react to every possible combination is not simple.

Unless you are dealing with a Single NPC Town - situation with key story elements.

 

Especially skyrim it is a massive world and more importantly a Voice Acted world.

The more voice lines a VA has to do the more expensive it gets, and larger the game gets.

 

In Text based games it reduces the workload as you can simply use flag states to change the NPC dialog accordingly to pull from a dialog pool.

You could write a few thousand lines for the cost of a VA doing several dozen.

 

 This is also why you see in MMO games mixing Text and VA.

VA is kept for more key moments while Text is kept for the rest. 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

As far as any of us know, they still plan to use Behavior Trees for the NPC AI in PZ. I highly recommend reading up on Behavior Trees if you are unfamiliar with the concept and execution. This is much different than the AI typically used in open world/sandbox video games. Let's take your example of Skyrim (one of my favorite games as well, however lacking in a lot of areas). In Skyrim, NPCs have set schedules that they will perform day in and day out. If you download a mod that changes a whole city layout, that mod must include the navmeshing and pathing for every AI that lives there. This insures that the NPCs will still be able to carry out their daily tasks. When a player interacts with the NPC, they merely interrupt that AI's schedule for a short amount of time. They will trade/sell with you, give you a quest, maybe make some passing comment at you; but soon after they will return to their scheduled lives. The AI needs to be programmed to react in certain ways, only after an input by the PC. You can make it seem somewhat realistic, by making guards react to what armor you're wearing, or what quests you have finished. Ultimately, it's just a show of sorts. Every NPC is on a track like an animatronic attraction at the amusement park.

 

Behavior trees are different. Without going into too much detail, you can essentially create hierarchies of needs, along with the reactions to having or not having those needs fulfilled, and then the actions taken based on varying levels of success or failure within those hierarchies. At the base of the Behavior Tree--the trunk if you will--is the most important needs to be fulfilled. Obviously, in the case of PZ, we don't know the exact orders of these needs yet. However, I would presume that it would likely be:

 

Safety -> Health/Temperature -> Food/Water/Bandages -> Sleep -> Sustainable Shelter -> Weapons/Armor -> Basic Supplies (Clothes, Medicine, Containers, Tools) -> Basic Mechanics (Crafting, Cooking, Barricading) -> Advanced Supplies (Cars/Gas, Niche Tools, Generators, Water Coolers) -> Advanced Mechanics (Farming, Building Walls, Fixing Up Cars, Repairing/Refueling Generators)

 

This is an EXTREMELY simplified version of this list. In execution, this list would probably contain hundreds of different parent composite nodes, each with dozens of different children decorator and leaf nodes. But essentially it should highlight how this would not only prevent NPCs from doing something like applying bandages while a zombie is coming after them, or looking for a hammer when they're dying of hunger; but it would also allow a basic progression system to those NPCs where they spawn in, look for safety from zeds, then tend to their needs. If all needs are met, and they are in a safe place, they will proceed to look for a sustainable shelter. Once a base is found, they will proceed to work on their supplies, and perform actions to insure more safety and supplies for the future. And the cycle will constantly repeat. If they run out of food, they will drop what they're doing and go search for some, maybe even cooking or looting a nearby house for it if they need to. If at any time, their safety is compromised, they will either run away or fight depending on both current supplies and threat assessment. No amount of weapons or armor will save them from a horde at home base. This is the basic idea of creating actual intelligent NPCs that will play the game in a calculated, immersive way.

 

Now we can look to try and answer your original question. "Will who you are matter to them?" This is definitely complicated, however the short answer is: it's possible. Two things that will probably be hard to pull off are complex decision-making, and social interactions. The former because it will be take a lot of different variables (aka leaf nodes) to account for complex decisions in an AI's process. Imagine the AI needs food, it could easily just go house to house trying to find food. However, it makes much more sense to go to the local grocery store. However, if the grocery store is already looted or overrun, you need to account for every other location that could be of use in order of priority. Then you of course need to consider distance. If the AI knows the nearest unlooted market is the next town over, it probably should just look for other options. And of course, you need to consider individual memory and knowledge. If one AI in Muldraugh clears out a grocery store, do other AIs know this. Do they know they are overrun or looted before they visit or only after? These are all possible factors to account for with Behavior Trees, but it will take a lot A LOT of coding to create these complex branches that make sense in game.

 

Now the same is true for social interactions. Let's go to your original example: the well-armed Veteran badass vs the Unemployed fat guy with no supplies. First thing we'd have to do is allow the AI to actually react to the player. This is fairly easy, as I assume running up on random NPCs will give PCs the same Slight Panic moodle that running up on zombies do. In this case, you could just stick a Slight Panic reaction branch into the larger Safety branch. In this case, I would imagine the AI immediately assesses the threat. If the NPC is an even more well-armed Veteran badass, he may hold a gun up to the player and order them to move along. Maybe even demanding some food or needed resource, especially if it's from the fat guy. If the NPC is a wimp, it may just turn and run regardless of who they are facing. Let's assume the NPC is a fairly average character with a moderate kit. This is where fun NPC traits could be super effective and fun. Maybe the NPC is Psychotic or Aggressive. They might just start shooting at the Veteran badass before he gets a chance to fire back. On the flipside they might play around with the fat guy, telling him to give him everything even the clothes off his back. Then stabbing him and leaving him naked for dead. Maybe the NPC is Friendly or Charismatic. They may try to convince the badass to come stay at their base and team up with them. Or maybe to try and join the Veteran's base if they don't have their own. With the fat guy, they may try and give them some extra food or an old weapon just for a little extra protection.

 

Then there are also all the factors and caveats to consider, just like with complex decision-making but even more things to consider. If the NPC is injured and bleeding out, it may just ask for help from the PC even if they are Aggressive usually. Maybe the NPC spots the PC far away out in the woods. First it will determine if the player has noticed the NPC. If it hasn't, maybe the NPC will run away or try to follow the PC to their base. Maybe they will try and call the player over, or shoot at him/her. Is the PC known by the NPC? Are they friends or foes of the AI's group/faction? The response to the player will be wildly different based on what the AI is able to determine. It will likely hundreds of coding hours and hundreds of iterations to get it right, but a fully fleshed out Behavior Tree will allow all of these different scenarios to play out and more. The most insane thing is that the AI will even do these exchanges between different NPCs as well. You could meet up with your favorite faction a few days after you last traded with them, and a whole coup may have taken place. Maybe the new leader is weaker than the last and you can take advantage of that. Maybe he is more violent and will attack you even though you've traded with them dozens of times before. Maybe the old leader's wife is now being held against her will until she submits to the new leader. Will you set her free? Ignore it and leave? Maybe help them break her and join the faction? This kind of AI behavior would make the game so varied and dynamic, and allow each game to play out a unique spiderweb of different stories the will intermingle and connect at random points. Essentially creating procedurally generated radiant quests within the game that you may or may not ever discover.

 

tl;dr - Yes, NPCs will most definitely react to who you are. Whether that is running away from you, instantly attacking you, trying to trade certain items, or even convincing you to join them or let them join you. Furthermore, the AI will create an immersively 'alive' story in which characters and variables are constantly in flux. Ultimately resulting in a unique and dynamic gameworld that the player can both affect and be affected by.

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