SOE Becomes Daybreak / Russian shutdown

zzeris_sl said:

Good point but I'm still not sold on Storybricks. This is a company that didn't quite accomplish... anything of note.

Click to expand...

They apparently wanted to position themselves as an AI middleware. Just like we have 3D middlewares, physic engines, and apparently we've got voxel middlewares now (voxelfarm). So why not AI middlewares?

One of the main problems is that you have very different AI needs depending if you're doing agent-based AI (lots of individuals, i.e. the Sims), high-scale AI (strategy games), small-scale AI (FPS), scripted stuff (adventures/interactive novels). Having a general AI middleware is going to immensely more difficult than a general 3D middleware, which in turn means your AI middleware is going to be specialised, which means your market is going to be quite small. Storybricks is basically a middleware for sandbox RPG games, and, well... how many truly sandbox RPGs are we seeing around?

Rezz_sl said:

It seems like it would have been substantially cheaper to just use their own quest/ai system and just add individual npc factions to it.

Click to expand...

The result, however, is as man-power intensive as every quest-based themepark MMOs. The engine is cheap, but you need lots of quest writers.

The video of the DE city seemed to hint at basically a Sims-type agent AI. Basically, each agent (NPC) has a set of potential desires (seeks resource X, social contact, rest, conflicts, safety), and a set of personality traits that define the relative importance of those. The set is determined at creation with a base values depending, say, on faction, race and class (not just player-playable classes, but internal ones), with random variations added. Then, the desires grow at their natural rate for the personality trait (greedy NPCs have their desire for wealth grow fast, non-greedy ones don't, or even don't have one), and the NPC then determines which desire wins out, based to desire intensity and proximity. That gives you lots of NPCs that act in various ways.

High-level combat stuff like the faction war we saw is basically a variant of that, coupled with a spawning system. You trigger a conflict, which adds a set of campaign-related traits (seek that specific enemy, occupy/clear territory) that some of your NPCs are going to have, plus strategic agents. For instance, a camp is an agent (like an NPC), which is going to seek out a location that offers the best combo between its desire for control (need the area to be controlled), resources (to build or to exploit), social (can't be too close to other camps). If attacked and "destroyed", it's going to flee and try to reestablish itself somewhere. And, in turn, it generates desires in the NPCs around it.

You can get a lot of very interesting behaviour with a simple desire-field model.

chantmaster_sl said:

Where you see "A lot of very interesting behaviour" i see a ton of bugs that nobody can fix.

Click to expand...

The whole idea is that you should get behaviors that you did not anticipate.

If you want only to produce behaviors you plan for, then you simply do scripts. It costs you. A lot. But you're "safe". And of course, every world is exactly the same, and everything respawns exactly the same. And you have WoW, with more factions.

But it's not intractable. The Sims do that, for close to 15 years now. And yes, sometimes, you're going to see weird stuff. That's the whole point: you do want people to discuss and compare their worlds : "what do you mean, DE are staying around Nektulos and Lavastorm on Cazic-Thule? Let me tell you, on Tunare, they've slaughtered almost everything over the entire east of Antonica, and it's real hard to go around there unless you're friends with the ogres, who are still holding out".