Living Simulation

Basic idea is to simplify everything into scripts or smaller execution blocks, all skills and tasks are broken down into steps which contribute to goals. When a character requires something, it searches its "solutions" list for possible ways to find what it needs and begings executing the solution, if the solution fails it gives it a score and tries another. Solutions are learned like skills and can be learned from books or other characters, I see "reading" being a big part of the game and introducing mini-games into the application for the player so that we can simulate the learning process. I see the solution programming being built from smaller functional blocks, parts of a solution may be learned or built from skills or from other solutions so as the characters learn new things they'll be able to solve things faster and perform other tasks.

Cooking for example, if they buy a cooking book from the shop because they have a desire to cook or are fed up of cooking the same thing, they'll learn recipies, the recipies will provide better food and hence a better score for curing hunger, the characters solution finder will decide on a solution and then begin executing it until the task is complete. The tasks and processes will have a priority system whereby - say a character needs the loo while they're cooking, a new task is added with high priority, the character stops doing what they're doing, forfils the high priority task and then resumes the next task on the list (which should be cooking). Each task can have procedures for what do when a task is being dropped or returned which are simply more blocks of tasks, while cooking a low priority task could be added to the queue to remember to turn off the cooker, this can have events associated with it so that if the cooking task is left for a long period of time the "turn cooker off" can become a high priority. If the character burns down their house, cool... we can then alter their personality so that they're scared of cooking or have a fear to fire.

As each character progresses in the simulation their behaviour should change, I want the player to have a big influence on this and also some fun with it while they're at it. Say we give characters an ability to "gossip", when they get together they could "talk" about things they've been up to or who they've met, they can pass this information as blocks of knowledge which the other characters can interpret and learn and hopefully remember, they may talk about the player and how they've been treated by the player, so that when you meet somebody new, they may have already heard about you.

The character socialising may be a little harder to implement, especially getting characters to ask other characters to perform tasks. To start with I see the characters been totally independant of each other (even at work, lol), whereby they're all working on their own specific task. The characters will tend to be pre-programmed with some sort of DNA that can be randomly generated when a new character is created. These DNA elements decide on how a character behaves and the weighting of choices they make, however, I quite like the idea of having a "nice" town where all the characters are nice to each other. This makes it more fun to be "bad" I guess.

I dont mind the characters being robotic to start with, I just dont want them stood around all day, eventually the socialising can evolve and get better but to start with I just want them to perform tasks.

Heh, I just played Lure of the tempress and noticed the characters in that game talk to each other, I really like how you can interact with the other characters and even tell them what to do, the menu system would need to be a lot nicer but I dont see that being a problem either.

Any other games out there that have a nice AI system for characters?

So long as a minimal set of responses are provided for the game it doesn't matter what happens, because of the nature of the simulation we dont have to try and control everything.

If a character gets killed, it doesn't matter (lol!), the missions and stories should be centralised around building skils and goals and they're always more characters to come from the mainland :-p (heck, didn't i say i didn't want this to be violant...)

I'd like to give the simulation the ability to balanace itself, so if you decided to go on a rampage, rules would be implemented for the local sherif to try to catch you. We may need to prevent the player from dying by simply sending them to "hospital" when they "die" like how GTA does it... and somehow penalise the player.