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Or, Why Everyone Should Care
The earliest ideas for this game came from a vision of representing the memory model for a game, where all the things in the game could influence each other to create “interesting behavior”, whatever that meant.
It eventually took shape as a wildly connected world that takes its form from a Fuzzy Cognitive Map.
The design for defining constraints for objects and story elements seems to be paying off in the design.
Today I contemplated the problem of a group set and text display. A “group set” here means a collection of 0 or more elements from a “group”, where a group is a well-defined, limited number of words. For example, the transportation group can contain “car”, “airplane”, “truck”, “skateboard”, “big pig”, and “foot”, while a specific person can have a group set containing only “car”, “foot”, and “skateboard”.
Each one of those items represents verbs and a range of values or chains of events. However, because a person may have multiple of those available, how does the story “choose” which one to use in a situation?
There are several answers to this, each of which depends upon the situation.
“Chris walks to the store.”
News at 11.
Yep. Bunch of bugs and clarifications of functionality and rewriting a parser. It’s now on to clean up after getting this working, including a clarification of the text specifications to make it easier to write this kind of statement.
Then it’s on to the generator and what kinds of things it needs.
The first attempt at getting the complete, internal data model to generate a proper text output resulted in the phrase “(space) (space) to the store.” That’s two leading spaces where there should have been text. That’s fine, it’s all part of the debugging part of software development, but getting there was quite the adventure.
The current internal data model looks like an old-timey telephone switch board. There’s cross-references all over the place to allow for generation of data while keeping it flexible for future changes. The primary organization is a tree structure, similar to a computer storage directory.
The project is still very much in the early stages of development. It’s focus right now is getting the basic story generation code working so that I can examine the generative capabilities and how to simplify the module construction.
There are two primary, short-term efforts going on in parallel with the engine right now to help with that goal. The first aims to complete the text generation using a full InnerContext tree (that’s the internal representation of all the data). The second requires development of the concept of verbs in the system - what do we mean by story and actions?
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