The avatar of the player is also driven by Drama Princess. As such, the actor will also go through the selection process filters to find the most interesting opportunities to do. But rather than making the computer pick one of those, we offer the player an interface to perform this task. In theory this could lead to situations where the player wants his or her avatar to interact with a character that is standing right in front of it, but the opportunities to do this don’t show up because other objects in the environment seem more interesting.
For this reason, the distance factor should weigh heavier on the selection process if the distance is extremely small. This probably applies to both autonomous actors as player-controlled actors. It’s a good idea to remove obects that are too far away early in the selection process. But we should add conditions that make sure that objects that are very close by get VIP treatment.
When doing the distance check, we could flag objects that are very close to ensure that at least one opportunity offered by this object makes it to the final list. Except when this objects offers no suitable opportunities. Or in Drama Princess speak, the Filter of Condition should not care about this VIP treatment. The Filter of Intimacy should pick the opportunities from this object that match the relationship best. And the Filter of Fondness could be skipped for the VIP object.
Posted on July 26, 2006 at 7:36 am
Perhaps we can use the Urgency value that we recently added to the Shock logic for this.
Posted on July 30, 2006 at 10:50 am
[…] This reminds me of the Urgency attributed to Opportunities offered by objects that are very closeby. If an object is closeby, the urgency of its Opportunities forces them to appear in the final selection of appropriate Opportunities, even if they don’t seem very comfortable. We could expand the Urgency attribute to also take the level of relationship into account, next to distance. And in a similar way: only very close relationships will cause Urgency. […]