[nxobject]

After hearing the "everyone pickpockets everyone and goes to jail and/or dies" anecdote for the "original" Radiant AI, I'm beginning to suspect that the following are incompatible:'

– there's always enough interesting characters to interact with to give quests etc.;

- live simulated world with emergent behavior that involves characters disappearing;

- no one enters or leaves town.

[recursivecaveat]

Honestly I think there is a fundamental incompatibility between: some sense of simulation or realism, and a high enough density of interesting events per character per hour to meet the player's entertainment expectations. A functioning society just can't supply enough arrests, trysts, bandit kidnappings, secret identities, feuds, marriages, etc etc, without rapidly tearing itself completely apart. There's a reason basically every TV show feels like it going off the rails after a few seasons: you can't lay rails in front of you as fast as episodes consume them. It only works at the beginning because you're borrowing against the stock of events that occurred in-universe before the show began.

Dwarf Fortress kindof solves this by zooming out to increase the character count, as well as the standard fantasy trick of super-charging the economic productivity of everything. Letting 1 dwarf feed 15 by working part-time on a 25 square meter plot of mushrooms helps a lot.

[o11c]

The "always enough interesting characters" problem needs to be solved by something along the lines of "if an important NPC dies, the role is passed to an heir". But ... also the world needs to be less murder-y, and (related) actually have a closed economy.

The article mentioned the problem of fitting audio on a single DVD (which would only be exacerbated by fallbacks, and no please don't consume my entire SSD) ... there certainly was a regression in video game creative dialogue when everything started to be voiced. And voice synthesis is an example of one of the rare problems that AI might actually be able to solve fairly reliably, though it's not clear if the jarring exceptions would be more of a problem outside the current utility problems. Though given that the individual input words should be known, probably just converting text to phonemes would suffice.

[nopelynopington]

Yes, completely agree. We're fine with text for dialogue in indie games and it's a lot easier to store and generate. I would happily have all the characters in Skyrim talk in text if the conversations were more dynamic.

The only problem is that audio can give you location info. if someone is off to your left shouting that you'll pay in blood, it's a little harder to place them if it's just angry text above their heads