19/04/13 - Setting the score Part 3

I left off a little while ago just before i was about to test the system against the major reaction. The problem i was facing was that the default for major could be either mid fight or mid flight depending on the character and there wasn't really a generic middle ground.

If i made it so the default was the middle like with the minor a lot of reactions could seem unnatural as they'd probably end up being the same as the previous outcomes so Ulfric and Sully would come out as the default Wrex would come out as the mild fight and Ben would come out as the mid flight. Most of these don't make sense.

Expected outcomes:
I'd expect Ulfric to express mild or mid fight, Sully would probably be over ruled by his relationship with nate and do the default actually...,Wrex would possibly have the same reaction as before.. instinctively aggressive but restrained to minimal aggression and Ben to go to extreme flight.

So what if you cancel out some of the factors that don't apply to this situation. If someone punched you would you take into account their past actions towards you? Probably not so i'll discount that first.

Changes to result taking out the past experience

Ulfric : -1
Sully : 0

Wrex : -1

Ben: +2

Well... that worked nicely...
 I should probably mention that the other factors would need to be affecting the score still because personality makes up a massive part of the NPC's decisions, relationship would stop you from having as extreme a reaction to things and would add to what the NPC expects, reputation would make you either more cautious or more aggressive depending on what you expect and environment would also affect someone in the same way.


So to recap so far. Everything applies to minor physical and everything except past experience applies to major physical.

Should probably mention that yesterday i did the hopefully final set of motion capture i'm going to be doing and recorded another 2 interactions so i should probably assess my system using them as well. The two i recorded are Having a weapon drawn on you and witnessing the player destroy or steal something. I chose these two because they were also on the fight to flight spectrum and because you'd need to change scores for the other spectrum it just made sense.

So starting with weapon...

Ulfric would probably draw his own weapon, sully would probably try and calm them down and tell them to put it away, Wrex would probably draw his own weapon and Ben would run. Like never before he would run.

It's getting a bit late so i'll carry this on tomorrow...


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Side note for future progress with this system:

I'm very aware that my system is basically using a series of educated guesses based on the character bios i found but given the time frame and all the time consuming issues i've had with cleaning up motion capture it's the best i can do for now. If i was to properly look into it i would probably look to use the aspects of a characters personality outlined by Lankoski, Heliö & Ekman 2003, and based on Egri 1960 to help create a new character bio for each of the characters.. this would keep the amount of characteristics uniform and the score system less erratic.

2003, www.uta.fi/~petri.lankoski/characters_in_computer_games.pdf (25.12.2003).
1960,  The art of Dramatic writing, Lajos Egri