Original Post
quote:IMO realism and depth are not the same thing. The human mind is an inherently biased thing, and the mind judges to be good whatever appeals to its narrative instincts, not what is actually realistic. This phenomenon is probably familiar to anyone who has studies writing dialogue - if you go to a restaurant and taked down word-for-word the conversation going on at the table behind you, the resulting transcript will not seem realistic, it will seem choppy and random. To get it to seem satisfying you have to make it more orderly and eloquent and funny. And people actually do use a lot of preset phrases; we talked about them in my linguistics class, they're called prepared phrases, and include cliches, figures of speech, proverbs, soundbites, etc. The structure of language is quite mathematically complicated, but it's also possible to fake well - I'm sure you've seen these internet toys that churn out fake essaies about Moby Dick or postmodernism. We've had previous threads in this forum discussing how to emulate narration and dialogue; Beantas started a thread on the topic about a week ago, which I unfortunately did not have time to reply to; superpig's thread on the topic is HERE ; llvllatrix's thread before thet is HERE ; bishop_pass's threads are HERE and HERE; HERE's one of the really antique threads on the subject. And those are just all the ones in the writing forum. I'm sure there are a lot more relevant threads in the game design forum but I don't feel up to searching through it by hand while gamedev's search function is still broken. If bishop_pass happens to be reading this thread maybe he would be so kind as to link to whatever threads he recalls as being relevant to the subject. Edit: Aha I found it! My original post from way back in 2000. This is not directly relevant but it explains some essential concepts like transformational generative plot structure. Edit 2: The very very first post on the topic, from Paladin in 1999. Another thread on generating character AI. Edit 3: Found it, finalllly! The ezboard where several members of gamedev last attempted this and failed, but generated a lot of interesting posts in the process. Edit 4: My old flowchart of story module generation. [edited by - sunandshadow on December 3, 2002 6:42:21 PM]
original post by BB-Pest concerning the verbal aspect: crafting a character only on a verbal base, even though very complicated, would be possible nowadays... but not a deep/realistic one. it'd have to base on a lot of preset stuff/phrases. a maths professor i know who worked on researches about the structure of language told me that the guys he worked with have large respect for language. its not just the grammatical structure but much emotional/implicit content as well that all needs to be make usefull in a mathematical way. (but perhaps ur knowledge is greater then mine... im actually very interested in the stuff u did research on)
