--- Mantar <mantar--2xtreme.net> wrote:
>
> Well, Black and White is an obvious one, and its AI
> is quite good.. For gaming purposes, Thief had
> wonderful AI,
> though I don't know if you'd call them "believable
> NPCs" or not, that's a different sort of AI, I would
> think.

Black and White didn't work on my computer. For some
reason the colors of the land and characters got all
screwy... Though I did buy it on Rob's reccomendation.

> The best NPC I've encountered would be Emily
> Short's Galatea.. If you don't travel in IF circles,
> you probably
> haven't heard of her.. She doesn't attempt natural
> speech processing or anything, but Galatea manages
> to hide
> the gears better than any other NPC I can think
> of... Galatea won the IF art show award for 2000,
> and has kind of
> become the watermark by which NPC interaction in IF
> is judged. http://www.wurb.com/if/game/1326 gives a
> summary.

Actually, I was thinking about AI in terms of IF
because it's actually within the realm of possibility
that I could create something in IF, whereas a large
fullscale game (with graphics and everything, even
ASCII ones) is totally out of the question.

As you know if you played Galatea, UI is a problem.
Sims is oconographic so it's easy to accept having a
half dozen to a dozen options, but text makes it more
difficult...

In terms of NPC interaction, which game, the City or
the Dungeon would you say had richer experiences? I
remember reading about how your stats would affect
your interactions, but I rarely ran accross it in
stores and such. Really alignment was the biggest stat
in terms of how people treated you. I wonder how
someone decides whether or not they like you in AR. In
the dungeon acolytes and noblemen and such.

Mark