Best Player Dialogue System?

[PascaL]

Am I the only one that prefers the U4-U5 dialogue system over any other (excluding Ultima Online).

What I like about these two systems was that it wasn't a "choose your own adventure" type dialogue where little or no thinking or effort was required to get information out of NPCs. In U4-U5 you actually had to remeber what to ask people, vs the later Ultimas having everything displayed for you as options. As a general rule, the NPCs didn't volunteer information like they did in later Ultimas, and in every RPG since then, it seems.

As rudimentary as the system was, I felt more in conversation with NPCs in U4-U5 than in any other Ultima game.

I can't help but think of how much better subsequent Ultima games would have been had Origin focused on expanding what was, a very effective dialogue system.

What's your preference?

[Andrea B Previtera]

U6 dialogue system was fine: the important terms were highlighted, yet you had to type words instead of clicking. So you decided what to ask, yet you were never totally "lost".

An enhancement would be a sort of "notebook" automatically taking notes while you dialogue with npcs. If npc 1 tells you "ah, i don't know about the sword of hsnkrstr, ask to npc 2", the notepad should remember you to ask to npc2 about it

[Dominus]

I have to say that the u4+u5 dialog system did NOT feel like conversations to me but tedious typing:
"name" "job" "keyword" "keyword" "keyword" "bye" with the possibility to enter keywords (and get the answers) even though you haven't learnt that piece of information already.

I much prefer U7's tree like system. Still no real conversation but at least no annoying amount of typing required. The best about u7's dialogs is that it could be flag based. For example before you haven't talked to NPCs B + C, NPC A wouldn't show a certain dialog option. Same with other stuff, until you clicked, stepped or saw something, some dialog options wouldn't show.
And the amount of NPCs made it necessary in both U6+U7 to still maintain notes who to talk to again.

[Daemongar]

I think the only problem I have with the U7 dialogue system is that there never is a feeling that a character is holding something back - with U6 and Quentin's Ghost you felt there was always something he might have in his dialogue that you just might be able to see.

There is no "tension" like that in U7 - most characters are what you see is what you get, with no chance of missing anything. I kind of prefer U6's dialogue system, or maybe U8 - since in U8 you can branch off in directions and never visit them again - like with that Executioner dominatrix - there was a sense of finality when conversations were over...

[Natreg]

I prefer UW2 system it was great, and also very funny in some parts


"I´m the Avatar and I´m gonna kill you"

"you cough like a hero and go away" (it was something like this in a conversation with Mystara I think)


I prefer typing too like in u6, WoU1 and 2... It would be better if they had flags too so you can´t get information you are not suppose to get or something like that but well, they were good dialog systems in their way

[Thepal]

I also liked not having every single option shown to me. I think the best dialogue system would have topics you can click on, but also other ones you can type in. Underworld is the only one to really have stuff like that. Like the deaf/mute Lizardmen prisoner. You can click on a few options, or you can type in various Lizardmen words to get him to translate. As you learn more words you can go back to him and ask him about them. There does need to be something to stop the player from typing in things they shouldn't know about yet though.

[artaxerxes]

>I think the best dialogue system would have topics you can click on, but also other ones you can type in.

agreed. Image a U7 conversation where one option was "also..." and when you clicked it you could type in any string you wanted. Now that would be cool. It would be like having pre-made frozen food and extending it to your own tastes!

Artaxerxes

[Wtcher]

You've actually just described the dialogue system in the Exile series of games... from Spiderweb Software. They're delightful.

[Ken Oh]

Here's the problem with having to type things in: Video games, by design, let you do things 'easier' than you could in real life. Easier can mean cheaper, faster, more chance of success, less risky to yourself, etc.

If it was cheaper, faster, easier, less risky to fly a plane in real life than in a video game, then why not just do it in real life? If it was easier to kill a crocodile in real life, why go into Ultima to do it? I'm not trying to say that things are always easy or that we're taking the easy way out by playing video games, because some things just aren't possible otherwise, like slaying dragons for example. It's easier in game than real life simply because it's impossible to kill something that doesn't exist.

Typing things in that you've read before can often times be harder than carrying on a real conversation. At that point it becomes too much and just plain agrivating. But, on the other hand, just clicking the topics is too easy and gets boring.

So, yeah, some sort of happy medium seems like the best, at least until AI and voice recognition gets alot better. ;p

[Gradilla Dragon]

Heh, Ken Oh, about voice recognition I can only guess you don't know what you are talking about. Voice recognition is good enough to make dictation programs. You dictate, and the words are typed perfectly, even working around your bad diction habits.

I remember when I played UO at some freeshard. There was a player who lost one hand in an accident. For conversations, he used a dictation program instead of typing. Every once in a while, his wife's shouts would be recognized and typed by the program; it even typed in all caps because it was recognized as shouting. It was so funny to see a character saying random things all of a sudden.

[Ken Oh]

No, I know exactly what I'm talking about.

I've used programs such as Naturally Speaking pretty extensively and can state that both AI and voice recognition would have to be upped considerably to make conversation with a machine no less cumbersome than a real life conversation.

My point wasn't making it so you could use a real life aspect, like voice commands. It was that it wouldn't be any 'easier' than real life; on the contrary it would be much, much more difficult.

[Gradilla Dragon]

Exactly what aspect of voice recognition needs to be worked on? The AI evidently needs to be developed much more, but tell me about voice recognition. A software that can type what you say, not just "voice commands" but actual individual words and whole sentences is more than enough. We got that already with Naturally Speaking, ViaVoice and others.

[Ken Oh]

Speaker independency and continuous speech recognition are still a ways off.

Again, I'm not saying that you cannot have recognized key words to speak out in dialogue like U7. I'm saying that you cannot carry on a conversation like you could a real person. For the implications therein, please refer to my first post above.

[Gradilla Dragon]

But that has nothing to do with voice recognition. That's a completely separate branch of AI, and it's called Natural Language Recognition. Voice recognition is just pattern matching, and it is completely done, good enough already. I agree, though, that Natural Language Recognition has a very long way to go.

[Gradilla Dragon]

Just to clarify, it's Natural Language Analysis, not recognition.

Voice Eecognition, in difference to Natural Language Analysis, only matches patterns and does pre-programmed things like converting your speech to text, performing a command, etc.

On the other hand, Natural Language Analysis takes a fragment of text and processes it, trying to understand what it's talking about. In order to do that properly, you need an automata capable of analysing the language structure, and a conceptual dictionary to recognize the "keywords" and what do they mean within a particular context. This last thing is pretty hard, as you may imagine. I know of a project of building a conceptial dictionary for english language: http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/index.shtml

[Andrea B Previtera]

You may be interested in my experiments with natural language recognition, then A couple years ago I coded a system which tried to "learn to speak" (and therefore answer, too) the natural way, the same way a one year baby does: he isn't aware of any notion of grammar, yet he somewhat learns to assemble sentences.

Have a look at this
http://www.livejournal.com/users/isabot
this is the result of feeding this system a thousand livejournals.

I wonder what would came out by feeding it the transcripts of all ultimas (dialogues, books, everything)

[Patrick Elliot]

A confused and disjointed, overly wordy rant using words like thee and thou? I'll admit that on the surface it is fairly impressive in some respects, but, besides its over wordiness, there is no direct interface to it, so it is really hard to tell how exactly it would respond in a one on one interaction. I suspect poorly, though I may be wrong.

[Andrea B Previtera]

Yes! an "overly wordy rant using words like thee and thou" - wonderful, that's what I would expect infact For some reason, maybe because of the simplicity and linearity of the language grammar, until now the best results were with german. But overall, if the "food" is coherent, etherogeneous and correct, the results are good. Unluckily livejournal is not exactly the best source for this case.

As for interaction, I could report many chats the irc bot version of "isabòt" had with people of whom she had been reading the log transcripts for months: it took a few minutes because they realized it wasn't a human being..

Are we dwelling in the realm of severe off topic or am I wrong? Oops.

[SB-X]

It's sort of off topic.

I do prefer the system U6 uses, but remember that the SNES and FM-TOWNS versions also let you choose keywords from a menu. I would have mentioned Exile if someone didn't already. Although I don't think there were "flags" in Exile, if you played the game once and knew the password, you could always get past a certain NPC without looking for the password again. You could solve that by randomizing things.

[zos/X]

I used to read the Games Developer (IIRC) magazine. It was like $6, had cool source code, like how to do pathfinding adequately and bounding boxes in 3D. All in one issue to boot! It also had this discussion with Warren Spector. In the interview, I remember Warren praising Final Fantasy VII for giving players the "illusion" of multiple paths while remaining so linear. He also talked at a great deal of length on conversation and basically said that conversation trees and dialogue in general in computer games has more or less hit a dead end, and he is totally right. Other than a keyword, how else is one going to advance the conversation? The NPC still has to know what the hell you are talking about to begin with right? I think that illusion is so critical here. NPCs with relatively little to no depth, ala Daggerfall, make the world feel ultimately empty. For as much as I think Final Fantasy VII is a terrible game in so many ways, it still does a very competent job of suspending your disbelief and becoming a part its own little world. You are so sucked into the story that your motivation for advancing forward is to just unravel more of the plot. For a game with virtually no interactivity, what is essentially the anti-thesis of Ultima or Deus Ex or Fallout, essentially everything someone like Warren Spector would stand for, you are still captivated at so wholly consistent the world and the plot feel. At least I was.

It really doesn't ultimately matter how the dialogue works as long as it is compelling. I really wish I had that interview laying around. It was really great. I hope Warren Spector keeps pushing the envelope, though I am not totally convinced that FPS only games are the future. Some people really like to see their Avatar's in the third person. Its a drastic psychological difference in how the player identifies with the in game charachter.

zos/X

it has been a long day. forgive my grammar.

[Daemongar]

Thanks zos/X - I think you are right on! The illusion of depth was there in Ultima 4 - just because those in Paws(?) with the mystics I knew were up to something, but I didn't know what to say.

It was with great surprise that I stumbled on www.moongates.com and realized those NPC's didn't have much to say at all! Not *that* shocking, but I remember fondly how gigantic that game seemed, and how many times I talked to the same npc's over and over...

[PascaL]

Following zos/X argument, wouldn't a book be just as immersive, then?

I think what appeals to many people, and the popularity of online role playing games, including the SIMS, would attest to, is the communication and interaction with other people not so much what they have to say, but that you can get them to say something at all. Ultima Online surely taught us that you certainly didn't need a story to make a game interesting.

One can just as easily oversimplify actual human language to simple key-word triggers as one can to computer generated dialogue. Heck, just go talk to someone of a completely different language that yours - you'll have yourself a real life Ultima4 conversation!

I don't buy the "dead end" theory of key-word dialogue systems I think there is as much potential there as any other aspect of game development.

[Morg]

Honestly I like the U5 system . . . cause quite frankly I like being able to skip ahead of the plot.

plus I get to feel like i'm interrogating people