I’m Fried from GDC…
GDC is always a good time, and it never fails to absolutely liquefy the wrinkly organ between my ears for at least a couple of days afterwards as my neurons rearrange themselves to integrate everything I’ve absorbed. Having Daylight Savings Time occur a day after I get back and before I’ve dealt with the jet-lag is not helping me with that task. Suffice it to say that GDC and the AI Summit were great, as were the sessions I attending for things like morality and characters in the Narrative Summit (because Personality-based AI makes morality topical!), and procedural content generation talks such as that given by Esri for their CityEngine tech. That, and seeing all the guys and girls I usually only get to see once a year at GDC and trade brain cells with, which is always a hoot.
Also, I gave a few demos of Interrogative…
I could tell you, but then I’d have to think, and my brain isn’t doing that today…
Speaking of demos… I’ll be putting some up for play soon. The GDC demo was actually quite limited in what it showed compared to the tool itself, but that will be changing over the next two weeks, and I’ll be posting an in-browser demo of the conversation system which will be updated over time as more features get put into Interrogative (I will try and update the demo as I update the blog).
Another tidbit is that I’ve also decided that the module dealing with the Personality-based AI will be split from Interrogative and sold separately as well, just for those who want personality in their game, but not the dialog system. Interrogative itself will likely ship with the PAI module built-in, or will ship in two tiers: One having the advanced features (opinions, flavor text based on PAI, etc.) that require the PAI functionality, and one having basic conversation features. This will all be settled well before the product page goes up and I have to make that matrix-y table that shows what features are in which version.
Other feedback I received is that localization is important (I agree, and that’s being factored into the final design), as is speed (the final version will be C++). The tool itself is going to be cross-platform compatible, for those of you who use Macs. I’ll talk more about tools and such in a future blog, after I have the tool rewritten and prettied up enough to show it to the masses without fear of ridicule and laughter. But I will state that I value tools as much as tech, because if it’s hard to use, it simply doesn’t get used- and I want you to use my tool.
Okay, enough rambling- I must now turn my gelatinous brain towards source code and do things…
Next Blog: Something, something, something, AI…
