Status update. Not too much done this week because I’ve been so busy with other work. Looking at the ‘todo’ list, there are things I’d like to change.
- (Low Priority) Clothing, so you’re not wandering around naked. Would be nice if clothing would rip and pop and such.
- (Medium Priority*) Much more detail in the language generation, especially the body description.
- (Medium Priority) Lots of body-specific tuning. Right now, after eating too much it’s easy to be full for days.
- (Low Priority) When someone runs just /eat, give the choices for nearby food. Having a multiple-choice capability will be useful later if we do something like have a shopping trick.
- (Medium Priority) Hearing system. Right now any NPC anywhere doing anything is shown. We shouldn’t replay actions to the player for NPCs that are too far away, and like wise NPCs shouldn’t be able to hear the player if they’re far away.
The hearing and language generation feel like they belong together. I need to think about a good way to do NLG. Most of the solutions right now aren’t particularly awesome and I’m reluctant to use an external library because it will tether the game to Windows. At the same time, I want players to be able to /say things to people so that NPCs can have a real personality. I don’t have much of an idea about how to make this work yet, but I’ll probably try a few things and go with what works best.
The other thing that’s really missing is actual gameplay, like fainting and stuff like that. There’s no real combat and no scene transitions. Really, the “game” is mostly just a set of ideas for models and characters and an excuse for emergent behavior.
What I should do is finish core gameplay stuff, like HP/combat, scene transitions (like moving between maps), and save/load. That might be the next thing to do while I’m figuring out hearing and language generation.