[HN Gopher] Rendering game worlds in text [video]
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Rendering game worlds in text [video]
Author : onli
Score : 95 points
Date : 2021-07-06 18:05 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| mrspeaker wrote:
| I've loved messing around with Markov Chains in the past, but the
| output of this seems more interesting... does anyone have any
| recommended resources for getting started with Natural Language
| Generation?
| filiph wrote:
| Filip here, the person from the video.
|
| Unfortunately, the best sources about "old school" NLG are
| physical books. I really liked Building Natural Language
| Generation Systems as a start.
|
| Newer NLG tries to merge ML and the old approaches. The only
| source there are academic papers, afaik.
| bikamonki wrote:
| Beyond cool.
| Animats wrote:
| That's very clever. The video needs more video game screen and
| less neckbeard talking head. Is there a paper?
| shannifin wrote:
| Love this subject. I tried this sort of thing back in the 90s
| when I was learning BASIC and making text adventures, but it was
| way beyond my skill (and probably not best implemented in BASIC).
| I've revisited the topic thinking about AI story generation, but
| that comes with its own challenges (mainly how to manipulate the
| world state to solve a particular problem in an interesting way).
|
| Anyway, this video does make me want to try creating some text
| adventures again...
| ud_0 wrote:
| > _I tried this sort of thing back in the 90s when I was
| learning BASIC and making text adventure_
|
| Same here :D
|
| I really like the idea, but I see problems. I'm still watching
| the video, so maybe they'll be addressed.
|
| Repetition: repetition in text can get quite jarring if the
| text is written like a novel, as opposed to the classic RPG way
| of displaying it as a text log. It's not unsolvable, but it
| certainly is difficult. Not only does avoiding repetition
| require knowledge of previously generated text, I think it also
| requires adjustments to the game world itself. It can't be
| Skyrim in that regard, it needs to generate unique and
| meaningful situations.
|
| Effort of parsing: it takes the user a lot more effort to parse
| free-flowing text, as opposed to graphical shorthand
| representations or even photorealistic scenes. We like to spend
| that effort when we read stories because we get something in
| return. I'm less convinced that a completely automated but open
| world can offer the same appeal. It doesn't seem impossible,
| but it's certainly quite hard.
|
| Of course the other alternative to generating meaning as a
| reward for the brain's effort to parse the text is to just
| generate the text with predictable patterns. In that case
| though, we are exactly back at the point where MUDs left off.
| Not that this is a bad thing, necessarily.
|
| Admittedly, I'm probably just jaded and very dubious about
| well-produced videos making a lot of grandiose promises when it
| comes to games. I would certainly buy this game and give it a
| try.
| onli wrote:
| He indeed addresses repetition later, in the context of
| battles. Without wanting to spoil too much (but many won't
| watch a full video), cutting the battles short by making each
| attack more deadly is his solution.
|
| > _Admittedly, I 'm probably just jaded and very dubious
| about well-produced videos making a lot of grandiose promises
| when it comes to games. I would certainly buy this game and
| give it a try._
|
| Do that! The result he produced so far is a very exciting
| experiment. https://egamebook.com/knights/ (no affiliation on
| my part, I just love the concept of these games).
| filiph wrote:
| Author here.
|
| To clarify, the way to address repetition was not so much
| making battles shorter, but making effects less numeric and
| more radical. You can still spend a long time battling, but
| instead of decreasing hitpoints, you: fall on the ground,
| stab a leg, stand up, get leapt at, dodge, chop off a hand,
| get stabbed in the eye, and finally break a skull.
| grawprog wrote:
| You could always check out AIDungeon for some ideas about how
| AI story generation goes. It works alright for story generation
| as long as you don't mind editing or retrtying , but as an
| actual game, not so much. They added some game like features in
| there, but they don't work very well.
|
| As far as actually writing a text adventure game goes these
| days, there's lots of options for languages and libraries that
| are specific to making text adventures.
|
| There's Inform and TADS for making parser based games.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TADS
|
| There's renpy, Quest and a bunch of others for making more
| visual novel/choose your own adventure style stories.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%27Py
|
| http://textadventures.co.uk/quest/
|
| There's actually still a fairly large text based game community
| out there these days.
| smcameron wrote:
| There's nanogenmo[1], "Spend the month of November writing code
| that generates a novel of 50k+ words."
|
| I tried this once by essentially making a Zork-like text
| adventure that played itself. The result[2] was horrible.
|
| [1] https://nanogenmo.github.io/ [2]
| https://github.com/smcameron/nanogenmo-2017
| filiph wrote:
| Oh hey! Author of the video here. I also tried NaNoGenMo in
| 2017 with my "Infinite Fight Scene" [1], a novel that is one
| long fight, utilizing an earlier version of the same system.
| I think I remember your entry (I'm a sucker for space opera).
| I thought it was great!
|
| [1]: https://github.com/filiph/edgehead/raw/nanogenmo2017/out
| put2...
| yohannparis wrote:
| Just finished the game, really neat tool and concept. I would
| love to see a more fleshed concept with more money and time
| behind it. I will totally follow the dev team.
| Quequau wrote:
| This was posted a little while earlier and there's interesting
| discussion there:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27760863
| nottorp wrote:
| Interesting ... there's a video talking about text. Is there a
| transcript? I skimmmed through it and most of it was a talking
| head plus some skyrim snippets.
|
| Whatever they're saying in the video, I'd like to remind everyone
| that the first games were played on machines that _only had text
| mode_. We 're coming full circle?
| andersource wrote:
| You can see the trailer for the game they developed here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2J11YFTsAE
|
| > the first games were played on machines that only had text
| mode
|
| This is also mentioned in the video, the author's aim seems to
| be to describe all elements of the game with natural language
| (e.g. rogue doesn't count, it uses text but in a graphical
| form).
| ludamad wrote:
| "Whatever they're saying in the video, I'd like to remind
| everyone that the first games were played on machines that only
| had text mode. We're coming full circle?"
|
| You can watch the video with 2x speed and captions. He talked
| about this!
| nottorp wrote:
| > You can watch the video with 2x speed and captions. He
| talked about this!
|
| That's still slower than i can read ;)
| onli wrote:
| https://filiph.medium.com/skyrim-rendered-in-text-1899548ab2...
| is not a transcript of this video, but it explains some of the
| same things as the video, from an earlier perspective.
| swashbuck1r wrote:
| What an ambitious vision! This is a really neat concept and a
| great breakdown of the interesting challenges with making a great
| text-based experience for game users.
|
| My kid was interested in starting with game programming a few
| years ago and I tried to push him down the path of a text
| adventure to start simple... and I recall not being happy with
| the text game engines I stumbled upon.
|
| Here are some links I tracked down to play with it more:
|
| * Main website: https://egamebook.com/
|
| * Knights of San Francisco game: https://egamebook.com/knights/
|
| * Game engine source: https://github.com/filiph/egamebook
|
| * Quickstart to run locally:
| https://github.com/filiph/egamebook/tree/master/edgehead#dev...
|
| * A web-based prototype https://egamebook.com/vermin/v/latest/
|
| Edit/Update: Contrasting the game on my phone with the how it
| plays in the terminal, while looking at the source files is
| blowing my mind :). The phone game rendering is really
| slick/polished -- I can see this was an effort of love. Nicely
| done.
|
| Here's the starting point of the game's text source if anyone
| else is interested...
| https://github.com/filiph/egamebook/blob/master/edgehead/ass...
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Have you tried https://twinery.org/ ?
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(page generated 2021-07-08 23:01 UTC)