When all the decisions are being made about what to do, the Drama Princess actors currently quickly run out of inspiration. The problem is that they can end up in a position where nothing interests them anymore and they cannot get out of it because their filters are very strict about what they like to do and with whom. And since they’re not doing anything, their feelings about the objects don’t change (appart from the very slow decline due to absense).
So I’ll have to lower their standards a bit to get them out of this deadlock.
Previously actors would get bored when they kept interacting with the same object. But now we’ll have to make them get bored with doing nothing as well. The more bored they get, the more tolerant they will be and in the end they will be forced to interact with somebody they don’t like or do something unappealing. Which will hopefully change their parameters a bit, so they don’t get stuck so easily.
Posted on January 13, 2007 at 5:17 pm
The further along you get in this project, the more “regulators” you add to the actors’ behaviour. It’s interesting to watch.
You know how you originally said you didn’t want to create an intelligent programme, just a belivable programme? In trying to achieve that you’ve probed emotions quite a lot, and I’m assuming you’ll continue to do so. Following that thought, setting an actor’s “personality” might turn up interesting results, and solve odd quandries. Before you were asking whether picking a flower is more or less intimate than admiring it; I think they’re pretty much the same, but one indicates preservation and one selfish gain. An actor more prone to peaceful, calm behaviour, might water the flower, but an impulsive actor might pick it. This could also be interesting when actors interact with actors; sooner or later an observer would figure out the formula (“she’s already hugged him, so she’ll either kiss him or talk to him”) and the actors would lose belivability, but giving personality might fix this.
Or is a similar system already in place?
Posted on January 13, 2007 at 7:49 pm
There is only one individual property in the current system. It’s called Enthusiasm and it defines how eager an actor is to make changes to his relationships, or how tolerant he is for interactions that don’t match his relationships.
I haven’t really added much “regulators”. But I have refined their function here and there. In total it’s still a “stupid” system. 😉
I don’t agree that extreme individuality would necessarily add to the believability. It might as well turn the whole thing into a caricature. What I would like to achieve is that the idea that a certain actor is impulsive or calm, comes from the interpretation from the viewer.
You might be right about the predictability of the formula. But don’t forget that this formula is only a way to structure things. The game doesn’t need to be about relationships even if Drama Princess uses those terms. Also, an actor will have these “relationships” with everything in the world. That may confuse things sufficiently to prevent predictability.
On the other hand, I don’t think predictability is necessarily bad for believability. A lot depends on the context. As per an older post, for us it is more about the willingness to suspend disbelief than about the suspension itself.
Posted on January 16, 2007 at 11:57 pm
Enthusiasm fits the bill for what I was thinking about. My “personality” morphed into a scale between calm and impulsive, and wherever an actor was placed detirmened how likely they were to use interactions that didn’t match their relationship. Enthusiasm reverses that, but still fits.
Seeing as you’re not searching for intelligence, it’s always going to be stupid. 😉 Even things like [url=http://www.titane.ca/concordia/dfar251/igod/main.html]iGod[/url] aren’t intelligent, and they try to be. Whether or not it APPEARS stupid is different, but it will always be stupid.
As for your last three paragraphs, well I can either go through them individually saying I agree with them, or I can just say now that everything you’ve said roughly matches my own thoughts. =D
Posted on April 12, 2007 at 12:13 am
I haven’t gotten much done these days. So it goes. What can I say? I’ve just been letting everything pass me by. Basically not much going on lately, but it’s not important. I’ve basically been doing nothing worth mentioning.