Behaviour Editor Brainstorming

Okay, I got it, just one more thing, if two behaviours are conflicting, is one randomly chosen? How will that work?

Gryphogrox wrote:

Okay, I got it, just one more thing, if two behaviours are conflicting, is one randomly chosen? How will that work?

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I assume you mean a situation along the lines of a follow and flee action triggered simultaneously?
Hm... I hadn't though of that, good point...

Buffering, please wait...

I'd suggest that we have a list of certain actions which conflict, and the player can reorder them to change the priority. Whichever action is higher on that list would take priority over the conflicting behaviour if a conflict was to arise.

I am back from 11 days in tampa, florida.
Good idea Uteen.
I shall read the rest of this topic, or atleast most of it.

I did not mention this Uteen, but I ADORE your flowchart idea. It's simple, easily understood and programmed, and allows us to use the parts-palette style of editor that we're using for most everything else.

In addition, it looks to help facilitate the idea of unlocking behaviors as a reward for increasing intelligence, which is something I've been concerned about.

Tenebrarum wrote:

I did not mention this Uteen, but I ADORE your flowchart idea. It's simple, easily understood and programmed, and allows us to use the parts-palette style of editor that we're using for most everything else.

In addition, it looks to help facilitate the idea of unlocking behaviors as a reward for increasing intelligence, which is something I've been concerned about.

Agreed. BE should have its own complexity gauge which is measured by brain size. In addition to this, the number and acuity of sense organs should also be limited by the brain of your organism.

Hold. One guy here said herbivores would be less aggressive than carnivores. That may be stereotype, but it's not true. Hippoes actively chase and kill crocodiles. Think about that for a moment. And the original slider concept would be both easier to program and more visually appealing.

Deathbite42 wrote:

Hold. One guy here said herbivores would be less aggressive than carnivores. That may be stereotype, but it's not true. Hippoes actively chase and kill crocodiles. Think about that for a moment. And the original slider concept would be both easier to program and more visually appealing.

That's true. Let's stop here, for a moment, and consider what sliders we need to encompass all simple behavior, and what they mean.

Caution/Aggression
This would effect the base response to other animals, whether it hides from new things or charges at them. For fine tuning, you could choose its caution/aggression towards each other species (and its own) individually.

Sociality
Effects the tendency of multiple members o a species to build communal groups. It doesn't actually effect the behavior of individual animals, just the probability of you encountering more than one at a time.

Territoriality
Does the animal claim territory? How big is the territory? How aggressively does it protect that territory?

Intelligence (?)
This would probably not be a slider, but by increasing brain size or upgrading neural efficiency, you can put points in an intelligence bar. The number of points here effects how many custom behaviors your organism can have apart from the ones predefined by the sliders.

Curiosity
Effects the tendency of the animal to be found outside of its usual habitat or territory from 0% (never leaves) to 50% (spends half of its time away from its usual environment. Will be useful for ETOs.

~sciocont wrote:

Deathbite42 wrote:

Hold. One guy here said herbivores would be less aggressive than carnivores. That may be stereotype, but it's not true. Hippoes actively chase and kill crocodiles. Think about that for a moment. And the original slider concept would be both easier to program and more visually appealing.

That's true. Let's stop here, for a moment, and consider what sliders we need to encompass all simple behavior, and what they mean.

Caution/Aggression
This would effect the base response to other animals, whether it hides from new things or charges at them. For fine tuning, you could choose its caution/aggression towards each other species (and its own) individually.

Sociality
Effects the tendency of multiple members o a species to build communal groups. It doesn't actually effect the behavior of individual animals, just the probability of you encountering more than one at a time.

Territoriality
Does the animal claim territory? How big is the territory? How aggressively does it protect that territory?

Intelligence (?)
This would probably not be a slider, but by increasing brain size or upgrading neural efficiency, you can put points in an intelligence bar. The number of points here effects how many custom behaviors your organism can have apart from the ones predefined by the sliders.

Curiosity
Effects the tendency of the animal to be found outside of its usual habitat or territory from 0% (never leaves) to 50% (spends half of its time away from its usual environment. Will be useful for ETOs.

But what if ETOs spend more than 50% of the time away from the territory it inhabits the most? Example: 40% of time in in grassland, 30% in jungle, 30% in desert?

I'm thinking of running ETOs as a separate category. They live in and are tethered to evolution in one biome (I guess it would be a sort of breeding ground), but spread out into surrounding biomes. Their populations in nonnative biomes are proportional to those in the native biome.

Perhaps a better idea is simply having a list of all available biomes. You are given a percent of time in each of them, from 0 to 100, but the total is always 100.

Deathbite42 wrote:

Perhaps a better idea is simply having a list of all available biomes. You are given a percent of time in each of them, from 0 to 100, but the total is always 100.

I' not quite sure I understand what you're trying to say.

Carnodon
100% of time in desert
0% of time in jungle
0% of time in plains
Cannot survive in taiga!
Cannot survive in tundra!
Cannot survive in deep sea!
Cannot survive in coral reef!

Deathbite42 wrote:

Carnodon
100% of time in desert
0% of time in jungle
0% of time in plains
Cannot survive in taiga!
Cannot survive in tundra!
Cannot survive in deep sea!
Cannot survive in coral reef!

Ok, makes sense. the problem with ETOs isn't where they spend their time, its whose evolution they effect. See, since each biome is a self-contained stage for evolution, if you spend half of your time in one, and half in another, where do you evolve in? Where does your population really reside?

You evolve in both. Your population really resides in both. They affect the evolution of both. Let me explain. Imagine you are a species whose lifespan lasts bilions of years. you also have a massive lab. In one, you put a self-contained jungle. It has many creatures, from monkeys to snakes. The other is a sea with even more. That makes for a LOT of wildlife. But one species is special. His name is The Saltwater Crocodile, and he can live in both. You give him a bridge they can use to freely move from vat to vat. You will see that there evolve both monkeys that crawl into trees to evade him, and fish with scales he cannot break. However, let's say there is a leopard with more bite power than him. It lives in the jungle. The prior mentioned fish will only withstand the crocodile's bite power, because it will never meeet a jaguar.

Deathbite42 wrote:

You evolve in both. Your population really resides in both. They affect the evolution of both. Let me explain. Imagine you are a species whose lifespan lasts bilions of years. you also have a massive lab. In one, you put a self-contained jungle. It has many creatures, from monkeys to snakes. The other is a sea with even more. That makes for a LOT of wildlife. But one species is special. His name is The Saltwater Crocodile, and he can live in both. You give him a bridge they can use to freely move from vat to vat. You will see that there evolve both monkeys that crawl into trees to evade him, and fish with scales he cannot break. However, let's say there is a leopard with more bite power than him. It lives in the jungle. The prior mentioned fish will only withstand the crocodile's bite power, because it will never meeet a jaguar.

The problem is that with our system, it gives ETOs an unfair advantage, because they have a chance to evolve in every biome that they pass through, making their mutation probability much higher. However, I think I've been overlooking an obvious solution, which is to divide their modified odds in step 3 by the number of biomes they inhabit.

No, to be realistic, just make AI ETOs rarer, and player ETOs more expensive.

Well, that actually can't happen, because if that ETO cannot live in a certain biome, it can't evolve there.

Let me explain:

Sardo

60% time in open ocean

30% time in coral reef

10% time in underwater cave (lays eggs there)

CAN'T SURVIVE ON BEACH!!

etc...

I know some of you will hate me for this, but I had an idea based off of something I saw while playing Spore.
In the adventure editor for Spore Galactic adventures, there is a simple behaviour for creatures, which allow you to basically control everything they do. If you press ctrl while clicking on any of the behaviour settings (peaceful, neutral, agressive, etc), you get a much more advanced behaviour editor. A lot of people won't like going through the hassle of setting up complex behaviours for their creature, so we should definitely set up a simplified BE; that will appear first, and there should be a rather obvious option for more advanced settings.

Brennus wrote:

I know some of you will hate me for this, but I had an idea based off of something I saw while playing Spore.
In the adventure editor for Spore Galactic adventures, there is a simple behaviour for creatures, which allow you to basically control everything they do. If you press ctrl while clicking on any of the behaviour settings (peaceful, neutral, agressive, etc), you get a much more advanced behaviour editor. A lot of people won't like going through the hassle of setting up complex behaviours for their creature, so we should definitely set up a simplified BE; that will appear first, and there should be a rather obvious option for more advanced settings.

The AI system may be very complex, I don't think that alot of players will use it, So whats the point in making it?

ido66667 wrote:

Brennus wrote:

I know some of you will hate me for this, but I had an idea based off of something I saw while playing Spore.
In the adventure editor for Spore Galactic adventures, there is a simple behaviour for creatures, which allow you to basically control everything they do. If you press ctrl while clicking on any of the behaviour settings (peaceful, neutral, agressive, etc), you get a much more advanced behaviour editor. A lot of people won't like going through the hassle of setting up complex behaviours for their creature, so we should definitely set up a simplified BE; that will appear first, and there should be a rather obvious option for more advanced settings.

The AI system may be very complex, I don't think that alot of players will use it, So whats the point in making it?

For the few that do. If we make it easy enough to understand, more people will utilize it.

~sciocont wrote:

ido66667 wrote:

Brennus wrote:

I know some of you will hate me for this, but I had an idea based off of something I saw while playing Spore.
In the adventure editor for Spore Galactic adventures, there is a simple behaviour for creatures, which allow you to basically control everything they do. If you press ctrl while clicking on any of the behaviour settings (peaceful, neutral, agressive, etc), you get a much more advanced behaviour editor. A lot of people won't like going through the hassle of setting up complex behaviours for their creature, so we should definitely set up a simplified BE; that will appear first, and there should be a rather obvious option for more advanced settings.

The AI system may be very complex, I don't think that alot of players will use it, So whats the point in making it?

For the few that do. If we make it easy enough to understand, more people will utilize it.

Please note that we need stuff simple, not for the few that want something...
We need to program what most people like first, Than talk about what few people like.

If we program in simple ways to change AI without hard coding, it will greatly improve gameplay, since there will be more options, and it will save coders time by letting all of the other developers and players build AI.

Please don't quote the entire OP
~scio


For the use a part to do an action, add 'attack' as an option. I have a species in mind that has a hook-like tail for dragging dead animals and scratching stuff.

Please don't quote such long posts next time. Also, I don't believe we have met. Are you new?

About Calf's idea, "dragging" was accomplished in Spore 2005 using "verbs". These were like "part actions", except they could be combined. "Eat" + "Move" = "Drag"