design

I had a thought today while walking outside about human-like ai. This is of course, in relation to the game idea I posted a few days ago, but the gist of my goal is to have npc’s that can successfully animate and control characters designed from popular animes.

The idea is pretty simple, the npc’s will derive their actions off objects, not off of themselves. In other words, they will look at the object to determine how to handle it, not depend on preprogrammed responses to objects that are a chair. The objects will store data that the npc can use to lets say, pick it up, throw it, eat it, ect. And the npc will use their MBTI to determine what should be done in the given circumstance.

Part two of the idea is that these objects will also hold ‘experience’ data that the ai will pick up and remember for certain lengths of time. This data can be pugged into their design making structure and called on during other circumstances to determine what to do or how to interact.

Heres a live example,

The npc walks up to a wooden chair
He sees that the chair can be picked up, sat on, broken, and burnt

Along with these verbs are tags that help the npc with the decision.
Example, ‘sit down’ is tagged for resting
‘burn’ is tagged for warmth

He thinks about it and determines that he needs a rest so he sits down
His fatigue goes down and the chair teaches him that sitting down makes him rested
After that he thinks again and determines that he is really cold, so he finds an object that will light the chair (oil and matches) and does so

This demonstrates another part of the idea, in which objects must interact with each other using the npc as a medium. The matches will be tagged as ‘makes fire’ the oil would be ‘spreads fire’ and the chair’s ‘burn’ tag will say that it needs something to start and spread the fire, in order to be used. Sort of like, requirements for an action. To discover the tools, the npc must be able to scan local tags.

The chair is lit and the chair teaches the npc that burning things will make him warmer
However this chair exists in a hay barn, and now that there is a giant fire in the room, all the hay ignites

This is can be accomplished by state broadcasting. In which objects changing state ( eg. Stable to ablaze ) will broadcast the change to all other objects and and objects listening to such a change will decide what to do. ( eg. burst into flames )

So now our npc is to hot and the hay teaches him that hay + fire is not good.
He leaves the barn because the environment outside is not on fire

This action causes a conflict in his code.
On one hand he learned that fire is warm and thus good when cold
On the other hand he learned that hay on fire is bad and makes him to hot
This is not exactly what should be learned here, but I never said this design was perfect

And so our npc lives to see another day, only slightly smarter then he was before. But he gained some valuable survival skills.

This design still needs some tweaking, but at least now we have a working model that I can start writing and testing.
One other thing I should mention though, as these npc’s collect environment data from these objects, certain ideas and concepts are going to collide and others will become useless. We should also account for the human’s ability to forget ideas as well. Some form of garbage collecting will have to be done to clear out bad data. Just keep that in mind.