I made a first little text-based test with a very limited version of the Romanicism idea.
Some observations:
Despite the randomness, the behaviour in the beginning is (almost?) always the same. When shocks start happening, more variation occurs. So perhaps we shouldn’t wait until a relationship gets saturated to generate a shock. Perhaps mild shocks as the relationship develops, would appropriate.
Distributed “mini-shocks” would also allow the actor to express its feelings once in a while.
At some points, the girl seems to cycle through the same set of behaviours. So we may want to add a bit of randomness to the restoration of fascination.
The girl is always doing something. This will probably make her look unrealistic or nervous. In the romanticism concept, this would be solved by adding more opportunities to the environment (in this case, the room). But that would still make her choose between the ball and the room and might still make her interact with the ball too much. Maybe we should introduce a new element: idle behaviour. Just standing around, doing nothing much, looking at objects, or staring in space. This could be influenced by a variable like comfort. The more comfortable an actor feels, the less it will be inclined to choose an opportunity as a goal and the more it will choose to do idle behaviour. This could be used to help define the actor’s personality (fixed) or its mood (dynamic).
Posted on June 16, 2006 at 2:57 pm
When the intimacy with an object is very high, the girl prefers to interact with another object. This is caused by the fact that the objects only have intimacy values between -1 and 1. And the actor will choose to do things that match its intimacy best. A solution might be to to limit the intimacy to 1 when making decisions on what to do, and to only use the high value for causing break-ups.
Then again, since we mentioned above that it might be good to have break-ups all the time, and not just when the relationship is oversaturated, perhaps we can limit the intimacy to 1 overall. Rather than having more chance of break-up when the relationship gets better, the potential size of the break-up could become larger.
I like the continued increase of intimacy, though, because it also keeps track of the time that the relationship lasts.
We could use this time and increased intimacy to modify the behaviour. The Body Language book that I’m reading, tells me that people who want to improve their relationship with each other, imitate each other’s behaviour. But when they are in a good relationship with each other, they feel much more comfortable with each other and will imitate each other a lot less.