Organism Action/Reaction

Reading through a thread, I realized there's something important we haven't talked about- how exactly NPC AI will react to things. We know that it will react according to its AI, but what's going to trigger what and how will we set up our triggers? How will an organism react to someything it hasn't been programmed to react to? This is probably a bigger programming question than gameplay question, but it's one I'd like to have an answer to. Hopefully Bashi will see this and fill us in with his knowledge, but until that rouge savior blows us away with beautiful technical speak, I'll put up my idea for it, which is most likely quite flawed.

Basically, each behavior that you can set up in the AI editor has values assigned to it. I believe we could classify them as simply positive and negative, but we probably need to go farther in depth than that. Things you do in the game will also have positive and negative values assigned to it, and the magnitude of the values determines the reactions of orther organisms.

Not the best or most coherent concept, I'm aware, but i just needed to get discussion going on this.

Actually an even better question. How will the creature engine handle the animation data? Will it dump it into scratch-data which can be read or gen it on the fly? Because considering the complexity we are aiming to, it might be slow to calculate on the fly.

If something happens that it wasn't programmed to react to, wouldn't it just get scared and flee?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_machine

It's used in many games, including the best combined arms military simulation out there, Arma 2. If we can somehow manage to implement an intuitive method to change it for the Behaviour editor, and also add in based on player's actions in Org. mode, then we would be pretty much done.

well what if your organism is going into another species' territory? will the others attack? will you start catching the scent of territorial marks and the game will warn you? or will the others just abandon their nest? all of these possibilities. oh! and if there is pollinated content (like Organisms you made in a past game appear in your current game) can you set their actions reactions without using the AI editor? (that thing is not understandable)

I know you can answer these Q's because you're smarter than me

In real life different species, especially among carnivores are very territorial even around their own. That would be an interesting behaviour, which would possibly prompt inter species evolution. This has been seen in real life especially by looking at lions which have around 12-15 sub-species with somewhat minor differences.

Generally herbivores tend to be much more passive towards other species but still wary of their presence in their territory. Predators are often, as would be normal, avoided by any herbivorous species.

Normally if a species is encountered with something unfamiliar it will, in most cases consider it hostile and thus dislike it. But this could create an almost impossible world where everything hates you. Sometimes they become accepting and move on, other times the hardly notice its presence

Regarding Theslimy, I would think that either an in game warning, sound or possibly even a movement/animation could prompt you to knowing you are in a bad place. Species behaviour for the sake f simplicity would probably be simplified to three categories which could be split further down

The three being Run, Attack which is actually Defend and Pass. These could therfore ifthe developer so wish be split into Run-Retreat, Run-Avoid or Run-Stealth-Attack, just like attacking could be a form of intimidation before the species runs off. So many possibilities, but perhaps slightly complicated.

I would say the AI editor would probably be the most logical way to set the actions as random occuring actions could cause problems of have an undesired affect[b]

The action towards an unknown species would likely be similar to the actions between the same organism and a similar looking species. For example, most types of fish would be universally feared by something that looks like a bird, regardless of whether its encountered that particular species or not.

As for behaviour towards a completely foreign species, perhaps fear or ambivalence would be the default reaction depending on the timidness or dominance of the species.

GamerXA wrote:

The action towards an unknown species would likely be similar to the actions between the same organism and a similar looking species. For example, most types of fish would be universally feared by fearful of? something that looks like a bird, regardless of whether its encountered that particular species or not.

As for behaviour towards a completely foreign species, perhaps fear or ambivalence would be the default reaction depending on the timidness or dominance of the species.

I think this idea would work quite well.

For species that are entirely new, then maybe an average reaction to all known species could be taken: a predator mostly eats others or is hostile to competition, so it could experiment eating it and be quick to attack if threatened; herbivore would usually be accepting to other herbivores, or fearful of predators, so it would be timid to new species; etc.