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Re: Building Personalities in The Sims 3

#2
That was an interesting video. It's been a while since I've played the sims, and this almost made me want to get back into it.

Some of my takeaways, which might have some implications for LT
Lots/Places have their own motives, such as having a certain population at certain times, and the place will broadcast out these motivations to adjust internal priorities and lure in available sims.
This was particularly interesting to me, as it's a somewhat ingenious way of creating events. I could imagine perhaps a mining outpost which just hit a rare and valuable vein having a %chance of broadcasting to the area "Hey, come look at me, something interesting is happening here" Something that won't specifically tell NPCs what happened, but just make it a much higher priority to visit than would happen normally.

From the list of it's potential desired actions, there are several ways of picking which one to do. First, you can just go for the highest scoring desire, but this can seem robotic and repetitive. Second, you can randomly select from the n highest scoring desires, which is more realistic but can still lead to undesirable situations. Third, you can rank the desires as a probability distribution, and tie the randomness of their selection to a "temperature" of how successful they have been in fulfilling their desires recently, the more unsuccessful they've been, the more random their actions.
I also really like this idea, though I like the second one best, as it seems more realistic. When I'm confronted with a decision, i certainly don't consider every possibility, I have a handful of actions that are prominent in my mind, and go with one of them. So perhaps if the AI selected from the n highest scoring desires, but with thresholds to eliminate some silly actions and insert an inherent laziness to just keep doing what youre doing, until a desire is just so high, you can't ignore it...
Sims have a selection of 5 from 80+ potential traits, Each trait adds a unique motive that must be fulfilled and also opens up new actions to fulfill said motive.
This is definitely an interesting idea, and it definitely has merit in exploring further, but I'm not sure if it's worth the CPU power to give potentially thousands of AI a snowflake blend of motives. However, perhaps There could be a selection of "Culture Level Motives" that affect a whole population, and a selection of "Individual Level Motives" that any individual from any culture will have. Every NPC would come with 1 or 2 of each. But since the Individual motives and the Culture motives are different, then "Become famous" means something very different for a pacifist culture of scientists as opposed to warlike fanatics.

And some other notes, but not too much commentary on them
Personalities should be easily recognizable by a casual observer
Reactions to a situation are often more informative than actions initiating a situation.
Venue specific motives that exist only at specific times and locations, apply to all present
Auto-Satisfy curves and schedules, makes LOD simulation easier, to retrieve into higher LOD, Get position on curve and apply some displacement
The world has its own desires and issues low-frequency "Life events" such as getting a job, being fired, moving, having kids, dying in an accident, etc for background sims...Will adjust these life events to satisfy its desires for employment, gender ratio, median age, etc.
Social situations are defined events that modify the different action desires to define what is and is not appropriate in the situation eg. Host & Guest, Hosts pay more attention to guests, and guests don't do certain things in the host's home...unless you tell them to or they have a trait where they don't care about what is or isn't appropriate.
Thanks Flat :thumbup:
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