And this reminds me, I wrote that code 12 years ago, and I still want to incorporate it (with a switch) into the xscreensaver code, but never came to it...
Plus, the ghosts are faster than you when you are eating dots.
I tried writing a text adventure game generator once that would combine puzzle templates you gave it like "object X you need is in a tree and you need a climbable thing Y to get it" and "object X is in a vending machine and you need a coin to get it" to create basic chains of puzzles. Without more constraints it would do silly things like create a vending machine containing ladders, vending machines in trees, vending machines containing other vending machines and trees, and vending machines that gave you a coin for a coin.
All sorts of amazing, um, features, have been found in that game.
1. Obtain a vessel capable of holding liquids.
2. Drink from the vessel until it has one unit left.
3. Empty the vessel onto the ground.
4. Refill the vessel to its maximum capacity from the puddle you just made.
5. Drink from the puddle.
So you can also quench your thirst by swimming in a river, then drinking the coating of water stuck to your own ear.
So the cat thing was exactly the same problem. An infinite number of cats could walk through one puddle of spilled alcohol, and then ingest enough alcohol to get poisoned by licking each body part. Lick first toe of right foot? That's a shot. Lick second toe of right foot? Another shot. Lick third toe of right foot? We're having a party now!
On the one hand, it seems like there should have been some additional effort there. But on the other, the game actually simulates that when you dunk something in water, it gets wet, and then stays wet until the water evaporates. I don't know of any other game that not only does that, but also handles dusts and powders, and things falling from the sky due to weather, and even getting diseases by inhaling vaporized droplets of a contaminated liquid.
You would think that with all that incredible detail, the pathfinding AI would not kill the framerate just from two dozen pastured sheep all trying to find their next clump of grass to eat.
The pathfinding is pretty inefficient because it's entirely invented by the guy who wrote it. Who doesn't know anything about pathfinding algorithms. Also it's entirely single threaded.
Dwarf Fortress is kind of the ur-example of passionately solving the wrong problem.
It's a fantastic game, and it's heartbreaking to me how much more fantastic it could be if the author adjusted his priorities a bit.
Make it procedurally generated and allow people to share the best ones they find.
I think so too but couldn't work out how. It needs something extra on top to give you a reason to work through the puzzles I think. So games like Sokoban where you could generate random puzzles don't need much of a reason behind them but all good text adventures are tied together with a plot of some sorts unless you can think of any examples. I binge read text adventure walkthroughs for puzzle ideas and the same generic puzzles felt surprisingly common (e.g. grate + crowbar, key + door, vampire + garlic, coin + vending machine, tree + ladder, spade + grave) but a game composed only of these would probably be dull.
Actually "virtual reality world created by a computer that doesn't understand how our world works" is the plot of the VR game Job Simulator I think.
I've been thinking on these lines recently too, and maybe the game could be to allow others to experience the fun you're having in building these rules and watching the outcomes? Letting them author the rules, and watch the outcomes. Or letting them manage and upgrade the bots, sorta like an overlord who doesn't actually chop wood etc.
This is kind of a nebulous idea (and definitely not new), but spawns from the fun I've been having the past few weeks in writing a bunch of simple rules for cities to attack, ally, trade with each other. Watching kingdoms evolve, alliances form and break, funny situations like a rock shortage eventually triggering a massive war among all kingdoms, was fun. It might not be as fun for a passive observer, but as the author of the rules, the feedback loop of making changes and watching the emergent outcomes was pretty neat (kinda like programming, heh). But it is a scary path to go down, if the intention is to market it as a game, because it doesn't look or sound like any "real" game.
On a different note, Dwarf Fortress is ripe with such emergent outcomes. On another different note, Robocode is quite fun where you author bots and rules and watch how the bots fare against each other.
I love emergent AI game situations like that! Even that feeling of seeing enemies in Doom fighting each other hasn't been surpassed by that much in modern games I feel. Spelunky had a few moments like that though.
> Watching kingdoms evolve, alliances form and break, funny situations like a rock shortage eventually triggering a massive war among all kingdoms, was fun. It might not be as fun for a passive observer, but as the author of the rules, the feedback loop of making changes and watching the emergent outcomes was pretty neat (kinda like programming, heh).
Sounds fun! Any more situations like that?
I tried another prototype where it was a text adventure in a single room containing NPCs where certain NPCs liked, loved or hated each other (which limited their actions), there was objects characters could obtain (like a gun to threaten people to do actions for you or money to bribe people), characters had attributes (like intimidating, gullible, jealous) and as the player you could ask characters to do things for you and they could do the same. It had the same issue of nonsensical things happening which were unintentionally funny. Huge state space explosion though.
So I gave a NPC the goal to make a sandwich from bread and cheese which two of his friends were holding. Instead of just asking his friends for the ingredients, he obtains a gun, threatens a NPC he hates to steal the ingredients from his friends then threatens him to make the sandwich and hand it over. A valid but inefficient solution in the search tree basically. You'd probably want some common sense logic that most characters want to achieve their goal in a way that doesn't impact their social standing. Same thing as before though, instead of making the NPCs normal humans you could come up with a story about why they don't act normal to sidestep the common sense issue.
You kind of need to get a feel or knack for navigating the so-called "edge of chaos" between order -- too many restrictions/rules = predictable patterns = boring -- and disorder -- pick everything random and it becomes the conceptual equivalent of the "rainbow puke" mush of random RGB pixels that is always infinitely different but always looks like the exact same flavour of static. Similarly if you pick random notes from a few octaves to make a tune -- in theory you should come across all the famous earworms like Axel F, Smoke on the water, Final Countdown, etc etc, in practice you get a different slice of the same warbly nothing 99.9999% of the time.
That is, in some sense, where the Infinite Monkey theorem seemingly breaks down, while at the same time it is also exactly where it derives its poignancy. It's a very powerful pulling force between two opposites.
Either way, read all about procedural anything generation for games on this great website: http://www.gamesbyangelina.org/
One very interesting idea, that has become quite feasible with modern computing power, is to use constraint solvers. Sure they are NP-complete but in practice they do a pretty good job. Imagine if you have a loose framework for puzzles, or challenges (maybe rooms with monsters and items) and it generates a beautiful wide variety of novel game play. Except, just like in real life, you can't always win. But you want it to, just like in a "hero's story", be just winnable, all the time. And you want your player to be able to trust that it is (it doesn't sound like a lot of fun bashing your head against a random-generated puzzle that turns out to be logically impossible). Constraint solvers can actually do this! There's a few articles on the Games By Angelina website.
I think that a constraint solver could very easily generate random Sokoban-levels that are guaranteed to be solvable. Now you need some (relative) measure of "difficulty" to sort them in order to create that feeling of progression and challenge. Which I also think is doable (amount of backtracking, "mental stack" required, etc).
Haha, exactly, it was a really funny prototype. It took you by surprise by how much common sense knowledge you kept having to feed into it to stop it doing bizarre things e.g. knowledge like vending machines only contain small things, vending machines don't dispense the thing you put into them, large things aren't found in trees, ladders + trees + vending machines are large, vending machines are found on the ground... Even with all that it would put vending machines in the middle of a forrest, trees in an office and stack vending machines on top of each other so you would have to keep going if you wanted it to have some grounding in reality.
Also, if you're not careful you'd need constraint solving to make sure adding a new object into the world didn't short circuit a previous puzzle e.g. if you had an elaborate puzzle to obtain a coin but then added a second coin for another puzzle you could use the latter to skip the former puzzle.
> The kind of game like Bureaucracy that puts the player into some borderline absurdist rage that soon changes into laughter.
Yeah, I was wondering if you could treat the absurdity as a feature somehow instead of the hard work in trying to fight it. The major roadblock I was finding is it's hard to make the player care about what's going on if it's just a bunch of generic objects and puzzles. I've barely seen any advancement in AI in terms of interesting computer generated plots and characters which is what you could combine the above with.
Instead of better gun fighting AI and path finding, I'm really looking forward to games with complex AI characters where the gameplay involves you persuading them, befriending them, manipulating them, interrogating them etc. where the game has a plot that adapts to what's going on.
Games are all about shooting stuff and physical object puzzles right now. I'd like to see game equivalences of movies in genres like drama and thriller that revolve around complex character AI interactions.
For those unfamiliar: You're trying to impersonate someone, so you use a convoluted trap to get some cat fur, which you use as a mustache. But the person you're impersonating doesn't have a mustache, so you draw one onto his ID with a marker.
That's easily the funniest part about that puzzle!
I'm pretty sure you can find all of these in Japan.
I'm curious about "8. Drop axe". Did your system have the constraint that the agent could only hold one thing at a time?
Or was the goal to carry the maximum amount of timber, in which case it's completely sensible to leave the axe in the woods and pick it up again when you return (assuming no other constraints, like competing agents or weather).
pickup-item was defined as:
PRECONDITIONS: HANDS_EMPTY==1, NEAR_ITEM==1, HAVE_ITEM==0
POSTCONDITIONS: HAVE_ITEM:=1 HANDS_EMPTY:=0
Which makes it so that agents carry one thing at a time, indeed.
You can use it in different ways: like you describe: have some agents prefer certain actions, different from the preferences of other agents.
The way I use it is to adapt to the environment. For instance, I make walking over to let's say an apple, less costly if the closest apple is near.
Look up `Children of Orc.'
The player can give assignments to the other Orcs, and the action plans for those assignments are displayed in-game. The Orcs are smart enough to find cheap plans. When tasked with procuring stone, e.g. they will see what the quickest way is. Sometimes scavenging for discarded stone may be cheaper, other times, with pickaxe in hand near a quarry, quarrying is the way to go of course. They adapt. But whatever plan they come up with, it is communicated to the player in an info-window.
The search space for the plans is ridiculously large, so testing pre-conditions needs to be insanely fast. With AVX, you get to test up to 256 boolean preconditions in one go!
To give you an idea about search space: the Orcs have a repertoire of 115 possible actions. Stringing together a plan of let's say 12 actions (some plans are longer), gives 115 12 possible plans. That is a scary big number: 5350250105473711181640625
A* helps guiding the search through this space, but can only do so much. So every A* operation needs to be as fast as possible.
So I had set up a test scenario, with an agent that could travel, buy stuff at shops, use axes, cut trees, and so forth. When I ran this test, I had set a goal of procuring timber.
What I expected the agent to do:
1. Go to shop
2. Buy axe
3. Go to forest
4. Cut tree
5. Drop axe
6. Pickup timber.
So I ran my GOAP test, and saw what the agent came up with:
1. Go to forest.
..
When I saw that step 1, I was disappointed, because the agent clearly should not be going to the forest when he has no axe yet.
But then, as a proud parent of my AI, I saw what the agent had actually planned:
1. Go to forest
2. Pick up firewood
3. Go to store
4. Sell firewood
5. Buy axe
6. Go to forest
7. Cut tree
8. Drop axe
9. Pickup timber
Hooray! I simply forget to give my agent money. But GOAP made him smart enough on how to get some money on his own.
I had of course equipped the agent with 'sell' action, and I had placed firewood in the forest, which I promptly had forgotten about when writing a test scenario.
I was so proud of that smart little agent!
Cool stuff, that GOAP!