Hello! It has been over a month since the last update. I apologize for the delay, but as I have mentioned elsewhere there really was not much to look at as the majority of my work was doing IO in a text-based console. I have been hard at work on the AI, and now have the logical portion of it mostly complete. It is capable of making deductions as I have described prior in the forums and elsewhere. This is a full "scripting" language with compiler, although for the time being it is parsed using rules from JSON which makes it somewhat unwieldy but I just wanted to get a parser working as fast as possible. It contains many features, and is both a subset and extension of the language Prolog, albeit with different syntax and grammar.
I use quotes on "scripting" language because it is not writing AI scripts like you might see in other games. Rather it is just specifying a knowledge base with various rules and relations. You can then pose queries to this knowledge base in order to make deductions and determine whether or not things are true or false. Additionally you can do more advanced proofs and solve statements for a given set of variables, finding the variables which result in a true set of facts. If you are interested in learning more about this, I recommend learning Prolog - there is a good free book I used here for reference.
So why not just use an existing solution like Prolog? Well, first of all Prolog is relatively bloated. My language fits within under 1000 lines of code if you ignore the JSON parsing (less minus comments/whitespace). It is compiled to integer symbols so it avoids string manipulation and comparison. I only need a subset of Prolog's functionality, so it would be wasteful to include the entire thing. Moreover, Prolog is not sufficient on its own. I must carefully modify the deduction algorithms to support things like score maximization, and thus I must have a full understanding of the code involved. This would be much harder if I went in and tried to modify an existing Prolog implementation, and more error-prone due to the larger breadth Prolog has over my subset language.
The ultimate goal of this is to build an AI that can make logical deductions and perform surprising, emergent behavior based on things that are not explicitly scripted. The term I have been throwing around, as have some other games, is a "Game of Thrones" simulator - something capable of weaving together a complex plot in which every NPC has their own set of motivations.
I also added in some billboarding to show sprites in the placeholder boxes, which makes it much easier to figure out what a given object is. Also reorganized all the items and added in placeholder NPCs and monsters. Art is by 7soul and available for purchase in most game dev asset stores.
So why not just use an existing solution like Prolog? Well, first of all Prolog is relatively bloated. My language fits within under 1000 lines of code if you ignore the JSON parsing (less minus comments/whitespace). It is compiled to integer symbols so it avoids string manipulation and comparison. I only need a subset of Prolog's functionality, so it would be wasteful to include the entire thing. Moreover, Prolog is not sufficient on its own. I must carefully modify the deduction algorithms to support things like score maximization, and thus I must have a full understanding of the code involved. This would be much harder if I went in and tried to modify an existing Prolog implementation, and more error-prone due to the larger breadth Prolog has over my subset language.
The ultimate goal of this is to build an AI that can make logical deductions and perform surprising, emergent behavior based on things that are not explicitly scripted. The term I have been throwing around, as have some other games, is a "Game of Thrones" simulator - something capable of weaving together a complex plot in which every NPC has their own set of motivations.
I also added in some billboarding to show sprites in the placeholder boxes, which makes it much easier to figure out what a given object is. Also reorganized all the items and added in placeholder NPCs and monsters. Art is by 7soul and available for purchase in most game dev asset stores.
Also, as a quick (dumb) experiment, I messed with voxel warping. Just 2 lines of code, could have some interesting uses for spell effects and such.
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