Why no text parsers?

[greyday01]

Why are there no longer any games with text parsers for interacting with NPCs? I would like that much better than having to select from a list of possible things to say to a NPSC.

[HeyYou]

There are a LOT of things I would like to say to some of the NPC's in my games. Several of them would be consider quite Rude. :D The problem is, coming up with an appropriate response from the NPC...... When you open up the field to anything..... it becomes rather unwieldy. :D

[Mktavish]

I built one on an apple II back in the 80's ... just a chat program accepting short text input , not checking it , but only really executing the random pick from the enter key. Had 50 responses/questions to pick from ... which seemed to make sense probably 10% of the time ?

I guess only fun for a kid / young adolescents brain ?

But funny story about it a few years later age 16 I think ? Was playing it with my girl friend that happened to be my neighbor.

And the question I forgot about popped up that asked "So did you F*** the girl next door ?"

Albeit I did end up marrying her a few years later ... early 20's

 

Now if game devs could crack the algorithm that Youtube uses to delete posts ... i'll bet we could have a fairly good functioning text parser.

Unless of course they use whole server rooms to run it ?

[greyday01]

They used one I believe in Return to Zork. You had to ask the right questions of various people you encountered to get items or information. That was years ago, surely the field has advanced.

[HeyYou]

It's probably doable, but, I would expect a lot of response to be along the lines of: "What?", "I don't understand.", "Are you crazy?", "I am not going to tell you that." Etc......

[Mktavish]

They used one I believe in Return to Zork. You had to ask the right questions of various people you encountered to get items or information. That was years ago, surely the field has advanced.

 

Never heard of that one ... but in 93 I was full well into sex drugs and rock n roll being in a band.

 

If you didn't know prior to that there were many text dungeon games ... some with text parsers.

But was sort of like you had to understand the language to be asking the right questions (input)

So before using any parser ... a quick tutorial on the language (key words) would be necessary.

 

And eventually what is the difference from just having pre scibed player input choices ?

[greyday01]

Another kind of challenge other than combat. Guessing the right question to ask of the right person. More immersive perhaps. Also, some of the replies you got were funny.

[Mktavish]

Another kind of challenge other than combat. Guessing the right question to ask of the right person. More immersive perhaps. Also, some of the replies you got were funny.

 

So do you mean like an alternate means of dialogue with npc's ?

 

Have the pick dialogue choices ... but at same time use a text input ?

 

Cuz that could work ... instead of wholly making the dialogue be based on the player typeing in a text input field .

 

I don't know how to write new games ... but lets say we are trying to mod an already existing game with this idea.

 

Fo3 / FNV engine for example. Which I am not sure how to get an easy text input for it ?

But for example : In a mod that is a mystery based , player is a detective .

Could walk up to any NPC and hit console to enter text ... with then a parser picking up key words ... to then have hidden dialogue / result scripts .

 

Is that in the realm of what you are imagining ?

[greyday01]

Something like that. If your question didn't have a listed set of keywords you'd get some generic replies like "I can't answer that", "I don't know" or "Stop bothering me". You could even have an option to use speech recognition instead of keyboard.

[Mktavish]

Something like that. If your question didn't have a listed set of keywords you'd get some generic replies like "I can't answer that", "I don't know" or "Stop bothering me". You could even have an option to use speech recognition instead of keyboard.

 

Ya that would be nice with speech recognition ... even for picking dialogue choices. Do you know if it is possible to pick up inflection with those these days ?

happy / sad / mad kind of info ?