Establishing Language

One of the things that greatly excited me about 2005 Spore was when Will Wright mentioned that you would have to "play a close encounters game" to establish common language.

Now I don't know about you, but I'd hate it if, when encountering a Nation that does not speak the same language as you, you'd still automatically gain diplomatic relations.

I don't know how, but if we can find a way to make the player have to do some work to establish common language, I'd be thrilled. Any thoughts/ideas?

Well for later on in the game we could have a translation technology. Perhaps we could have a language specialist?

yes, that would speed things up, but it's not mandatory
the further away from the origin of your language the harder it would be for you to understand the other language

A great example for us to work on would be "The Prawns" from District Nine. The people in Johannesburg spent three years in close proximity to the aliens, and so basically learnt their language through interaction like a child does. Obviously having language analysists and linguists would speed the process at which one can learn an alien language up. Only at a very, very, very high computing research level should a universal translator be possible, and it should have some unreliability until the encountered race's language is completely understood.

US_of_Alaska wrote:

A great example for us to work on would be "The Prawns" from District Nine. The people in Johannesburg spent three years in close proximity to the aliens, and so basically learnt their language through interaction like a child does. Obviously having language analysists and linguists would speed the process at which one can learn an alien language up. Only at a very, very, very high computing research level should a universal translator be possible, and it should have some unreliability until the encountered race's language is completely understood.

QFT. Ther should be some sort of missionaries that will live with the nation/race that they would want to interact with. Once they they learned how to communicate with them, they would come back and teach others. Therefore making the to nation/species interact with each other.

Albalrogue wrote:

US_of_Alaska wrote:

A great example for us to work on would be "The Prawns" from District Nine. The people in Johannesburg spent three years in close proximity to the aliens, and so basically learnt their language through interaction like a child does. Obviously having language analysists and linguists would speed the process at which one can learn an alien language up. Only at a very, very, very high computing research level should a universal translator be possible, and it should have some unreliability until the encountered race's language is completely understood.

QFT. Ther should be some sort of missionaries that will live with the nation/race that they would want to interact with. Once they they learned how to communicate with them, they would come back and teach others. Therefore making the to nation/species interact with each other.

Double QFT

However, what I was talking about was more of making this a part of gameplay: i.e. a minigame. It seems silly, but Thrive has thusfar leaned very far to the simulation side of things, and having the player optionally speed up the proccess would be a great way to get more gameplay style gameplay in.

eumesmo wrote:

the further away from the origin of your language the harder it would be for you to understand the other language

While I do agree, this is rather needless complexity, requiring us to add dynamic lingual spread is overly difficult, and would require the game to make the languages in the first place, impossible as all sound files have to induvidually recorded.

However, your suggestion may be possible for cross-species language, just uping the length of time it takes to learn/the difficulty for afforsaid minigame depending on the similarities of the involved sensors.

Unless if this minigame is very well done and seems realistic, i'm going to be against it.

US_of_Alaska wrote:

Unless if this minigame is very well done and seems realistic, i'm going to be against it.

I expected as much. That's why I made this thread, I'm fishiing for opinions and ideas on HOW to do it well and realisticly.

No one has any ideas?

Alright, what we need to do here is match things up correctly. i.e. words to what they represent. Now, their are several ways to do this, let's start talking.

Tenebrarum wrote:

Alright, what we need to do here is match things up correctly. i.e. words to what they represent. Now, their are several ways to do this, let's start talking.

So you mean like a flashcards game? I hold up a picture of a tree and type tree, then they say "tree" and we get points towards a translation?

For belgium's sake, no minigames. I don't want to have to go to the other city carrying digeridoos and playing some lame simon says. (you get where I'm coming from )

Language diffusion could be possible with some tinkering. We'd need some mechanics for drift, melding and assimilation of languages, but I don't think it'd be overly complex or too heavy to do calculations wize. Perhaps it could be tied with culture?

How would this impact gameplay is another business though.

Djohaal wrote:

For belgium's sake, no minigames. I don't want to have to go to the other city carrying digeridoos and playing some lame simon says. (you get where I'm coming from )

That's not the point. People have to match up these things to learn language in real life. My idea is that we can give the player something quick and entertaining to do with this that would have relavence and realism.

My main thought was identifying patterns, the central element of decoding language.

Djohaal wrote:

For belgium's sake, no minigames. I don't want to have to go to the other city carrying digeridoos and playing some lame simon says. (you get where I'm coming from )

Language diffusion could be possible with some tinkering. We'd need some mechanics for drift, melding and assimilation of languages, but I don't think it'd be overly complex or too heavy to do calculations wize. Perhaps it could be tied with culture?

How would this impact gameplay is another business though.

Rex is talking about Org Mode. How can you help your nation to learn the language when you are a single organism. And the way to do that would be to show things and say their name, interact with people from that nation, things like that. It's not really a minigame.

US_of_Alaska wrote:

A great example for us to work on would be "The Prawns" from District Nine. The people in Johannesburg spent three years in close proximity to the aliens, and so basically learnt their language through interaction like a child does. Obviously having language analysists and linguists would speed the process at which one can learn an alien language up. Only at a very, very, very high computing research level should a universal translator be possible, and it should have some unreliability until the encountered race's language is completely understood.

You'd have to have relations for a little while before establishing a common language, or understanding each other.
And yeah, I'm all for a "babel-fish" god tool.

The problem with this is that all language is going to be random in the game- you really can't learn something that's random, so we really can't include the actual learning process in the game.

~sciocont wrote:

The problem with this is that all language is going to be random in the game- you really can't learn something that's random, so we really can't include the actual learning process in the game.

Not really truly. But, we can set up a minigame-oid scenario that would reward the player for using org mode.

~sciocont wrote:

US_of_Alaska wrote:

A great example for us to work on would be "The Prawns" from District Nine. The people in Johannesburg spent three years in close proximity to the aliens, and so basically learnt their language through interaction like a child does. Obviously having language analysists and linguists would speed the process at which one can learn an alien language up. Only at a very, very, very high computing research level should a universal translator be possible, and it should have some unreliability until the encountered race's language is completely understood.

You'd have to have relations for a little while before establishing a common language, or understanding each other.
And yeah, I'm all for a "babel-fish" god tool.

The problem with this is that all language is going to be random in the game- you really can't learn something that's random, so we really can't include the actual learning process in the game.

Yeah, exactly.

Language descriptions Will. Not. Be. Real.

Unless we represent the languages with a substitution cipher, any "learn the language of the other species" portions will have to be some sort of minigame, or progress bar, or whatnot. There's no two ways about it. And even with a substitution cipher, we're limited to "you just learned that f = q" reminiscent of Final Fantasy X (Al Bhed)

As a general rule, and this spans across the board too:

If you can't do it yourself, the computer can't do it for you.

In order to program some sort of language system, for instance, we would have to:

Create a new language,
Analyze the process that was taken to create the language,
Implement that process.

And i don't mean some basic "argae = food, choghcog = car"

I mean a full fledged language that people could actually learn and use on a daily language.

And that is no easy feat. But until that is done, forget about "dynamic language systems" and the like.


And that applies to "Auto-evo" even though the discussion thread of it is dead.

Soon, in fact, I will be writing a detailed post on just exactly why we cannot rely on auto-evo to solve all our problems.

I await that thread with baited breath, so I can try to think a way around it. Auto-evo has consistantly been the biggest problem with this game next to the TE.

Bashi, I know this. I'm not saying "Have the player learn their language." I'm saying "Give the player the ability to do something significant in org mode." My favorite example of this is in 05 Spore, when Will tries to communicate with another race using a series of flashing lights and sounds. It doesn't have to be word for word. It can even simply be trying to figure out the most basic basic structure, auditory vs. visual vs. olfactory, etc. This may be specifically a race to race thing and not a nation to nation one.

Tenebrarum wrote:

Bashi, I know this. I'm not saying "Have the player learn their language." I'm saying "Give the player the ability to do something significant in org mode." My favorite example of this is in 05 Spore, when Will tries to communicate with another race using a series of flashing lights and sounds. It doesn't have to be word for word. It can even simply be trying to figure out the most basic basic structure, auditory vs. visual vs. olfactory, etc. This may be specifically a race to race thing and not a nation to nation one.

Umm, I'm on your side. You suggested a minigame-esque system and i'm agreeing with you.

Bashinerox wrote:

Umm, I'm on your side. You suggested a minigame-esque system and i'm agreeing with you.

Sorry. I mis-read. I'm a little tired.

So, can we work on the actual mini-game part of this now?

Tenebrarum wrote:

Bashinerox wrote:

Umm, I'm on your side. You suggested a minigame-esque system and i'm agreeing with you.

Sorry. I mis-read. I'm a little tired.

So, can we work on the actual mini-game part of this now?

We're going to need to make it flow seamlessly in gameplay. Maybe it could be more of a quest than a minigame.