{"id":131,"date":"2006-11-18T21:52:30","date_gmt":"2006-11-18T19:52:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/?p=131"},"modified":"2006-11-18T21:52:30","modified_gmt":"2006-11-18T19:52:30","slug":"sufficiently-simple","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/?p=131","title":{"rendered":"Sufficiently simple?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is our Decision System<\/a> simple enough? Or better: is the logic to choose a goal worth the CPU time compared to a purely random choice? Will that logic make a great enough difference?<\/p>\n

If I remember correctly, the main reason why purely random decisions are not believable is because they almost always lead to inconsistent behaviour (making all Actors look like lunatics). For interactions between virtual characters this may be acceptible to some extent (because, thanks to the missing information, we may make up for the lack of logic with our imagination), but when the player interacts with a virtual character, inconsistent behaviour would quickly destroy the illusion. Another problem is robotic behaviour: when the choice is purely random, the chance of the Actor repeating himself is great.<\/p>\n

In our system, the first problem is solved by Affection: every Actor has a relationship with every Object in the world and that relationship only changes in small increments. All interactions have an Intimacy value that makes recommendations about which Affection level the interaction is appropriate for. The second problem is solved by Interest: the Actor loses Interest in an interaction immediately after having done it. This Interest grows back slowly, allowing the Actor to do a few other things before repeating the same one again.<\/p>\n

The question is: is this convoluted? Or does it only sound<\/em> convoluted because of the heavy words we use? After all, the Affection system is not much more than a way to keep track of the kind of interaction you did with a certain Object last time and to make sure that you do something that is not too different. And “losing Interest” is even more mechanical.<\/p>\n

I guess we can easily test this: it’s easy to set up a system that randomly triggers behaviour. Maybe we should include that in our Behaviour System tests. Then we can observe what randomness leads to and be fully aware of the reasons why it’s not good. With that information we can evaluate the theory of our Decision system and ammend it where appropriate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is our Decision System simple enough? Or better: is the logic to choose a goal worth the CPU time compared to a purely random choice? Will that logic make a great enough difference? If I remember correctly, the main reason why purely random decisions are not believable is because they almost always lead to inconsistent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}