Posted by Michael on March 28th, 2007, in Development
The second Filter that removes behaviours in Drama princess’s Decision Manager is the Filter of Condition. This is a series of expressions per Object that retun yes or no to the question whether the behaviour is possible with them.
While this system remains useable, it does seem badly designed at the moment. As it turns out, while working on The Path, in practice, most behaviours are not possible with most objects. They are too specific. Also, because of the limited amount of animations available, the most frequently used condition is just that the Actor should have an animation asset to perform the behaviour.
As a result, the conditions that are defined by rules that make sense in the game world, make up a very small minority. I think we should replace this system so that only the conditions that have specific rules are evaluated and all the others are simply checked against whether the behaviour is possible with the object and whether the actor has animation data to perform the behaviour.
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Posted by Michael on March 21st, 2007, in Development
It’s been really good to continue the work on Drama Princess within the context of The Path. So many things come up when dealing with a real game, that I would never have thought of when dealing with the system on a more abstract level. The engine has changed quite a bit already, in response to the new behaviours that I’m creating for the game.
Speaking of which, making those behaviours is laborious. They are all little applications that drive the actor, sometimes multiple actors. It’s quite a bit of work to figure out the conditional structure that makes sure that the actor walks to the right position, faces the right direction, etc before doing something. Several of these things could be automated on a higher level, and some have been. But I want the behaviours to remain very powerful. They can steer the whole game, if necessary, in a relatively simple way.
I do have a feeling that there are only so many combinations of actors, objects and interactions and that at some point, old behaviours will start serving as templates for new ones, making the work a lot lighter.
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Posted by Michael on March 2nd, 2007, in Development
Patrick Dugan will talk a little bit about Drama Princess in his poster session entitled “Comparing First-Generation Drama Engines” on March 8 at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. I’m quite curious… 🙂
We will be there as well, presenting the first game to include Drama Princess technology, now called The Path (formerly 144) in the booth of the Benelux Game Initiative (5310 NH).
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