NOTES

for goap 3

THIS IS MOSTLY NOTES FOR MYSELF


planner

planner should be able to reasonably predict the cost of repeating actions

agents:
in an rpg game, the player can expect to talk to NPC's and and to gather
information about quests, items, other npc's, etc.

i think that goap can become an engine of sorts, dictating every action in the
game.  basic play elements can be emulated through goap and would not have to
be explicitly coded into the game.  take simple "hello" meet/greet actions with
an npc:
    npc will have a insatiable desire to talk to a player
    they will have a different thing to say depending on mood/state of player

a side effect of this will that npc's could possibly become more lifelike as
they can move around the game world to satisfy goals.  to moderate and control
the npc's and to make the game more enjoyable, npc's can have goals that are
only relevant at certain times of day or days of the week.

in the harvest moon series for example, the nps do have certain schedules that
they will loosely follow.  this makes the game play predictable once their
simple schedule is learned.  imo, giving the npc's too much freedom to act will
make the game world seem more random, and potentially frustrating to play.

tying the speech system to goap agents could make the gameplay more immersive
by allowing the player to ask unscripted questions.  while developing a system
that perfectly synthesizes english is not a viable option, giving the player
the option to ask canned questions, unrelated to the quest or story, with the
ability to choose specific parts of the question is a definite cool thing.

for example, the player might ask an npc "have you seen gary?".  the goap
agent can then search it's memories of gary and give a response to the player.
because this would be based on the agent's memory, and not some canned
response, it will simultaneously make the make more immersive and relieve the
game designers and writers the burden to creating dialog.

a frustrating aspect of some games is dealing with faction alliances.  for
example, in some games, killing or doing some negative action against a member
of a faction will cause all members of that faction to instantly become hostile
toward the player.  this is unrealistic in situations where the information
that our your hostility could not have reached the other party.

simulating the spread of information could also be simulated in goap by
creating goals that one agent wants to tell other agents things that he saw the
player do.  for example, they may be neutral npc's that will gossip with other
npc's in distant towns.  or, members of one faction may use radio, phones,
letters, messengers, etc to tell other faction members about the player.

this too could be emulated with goap, and would not have to be explicitly
programmed.