Hey Exanimates, Public testing of role system features has been ongoing, the main focus was how roles can interact with emotional states and dynamic events and behaviours. We encouraged people to try to break Derrin's behaviour by doing unexpected things or manipulating him in various ways with mind powers at any point including during dialogue and seeing if he behaved naturally and dialogue could be resumed with responses appropriate to what transpired and what was said previously. This was a particularly complex role setup to test the limits of the system. People found a couple of isolated issues, but for the most part this has been working well. We've also seen lots of thorough testing of every possible item combination for the new apparel system, which we've been fixing quickly thanks to the new system, and just general bug and issue reporting. We've done a few hotfixes and one big patch to address most of this, with only a couple of rare bugs and mostly minor issues still to resolve. Things are looking pretty good and feedback on all the AI and graphical improvements has been very positive.
The big difficulty we immediately faced was with the AI's emotion system and how they understand and respond to behaviour. Until now we dealt mostly with extreme loyalty, extreme adversity or a sort of chaotic neutrality, but now we are trying to model a much broader and more nuanced spectrum of relationships and behaviours, that are also to be supported by and interact closely with dynamic roles. We intend for this to work in any setting and for any person or group of people where loyalties and intentions are unclear. This could include various civilised settings, like perhaps a town square or a tavern, where there are certain expectations of behaviour even from strangers. NPCs must be able to intelligently read and carefully judge situations and respond accordingly, not simply be provoked to violence indiscriminately. Why is this person acting like this? Who's the target of their behaviour? Why? Whose side am I on? Could they want to harm me or someone I care about? Are they trying to protect us? Should I help them? Should I be concerned, scared, angry? Should I get involved? What would be the consequences?
The new Derrin is a good test case for this, as he can now be quite wary of the player yet still cooperate with them, choose to aid them in combat against targets, while also reserving judgement on those targets and avoiding hostility, being ready should the player seemingly turn on him, and yet forgiving of accidents that could be seen as hostility. On the other hand there are also undead with only perhaps a passing sense of loyalty to each other and who attack recklessly with little regard for who's in their way and will sometimes get angry at each other. This is all a result of constant and careful judgement of actions and balancing of emotions, not a set of simple triggers with set outcomes. To achieve this we had to make some major revisions to core AI, improve emotional responses and introduce much more sophisticated methods for judging behaviour and intentions over time, particularly in group situations. These are now brand new systems that will need fine tuning, but from the last round of testing we're seeing that we're already very close to a solid baseline for raw core AI. This is all designed to be supported by roles, which can build more complex behaviours, relationships and outcomes, essentially acting as a layer of higher level thinking based on these raw emotions. We've also been revisiting our personality traits, and studying ways in which they can interact more with these systems to produce more varied behaviour at a fundamental level.
As those who have been following us long enough know, dynamic and reactive NPC behaviour has always been critical to our vision and perhaps our most ambitious goal, which like everything else has only grown more ambitious over time. Just like physics, the goal isn't and never was about combat, or about some impressive gameplay moment, but a world that consistently responds plausibly to anything you might do. We design the world, everything in it and how it works to make it feel like a real place, not a game level. We realise this can seem a bit abstract and the path is long and arduous and there are compromises involved, but that's what we're all about. Exanima's currently limited scope may not seem like the best platform for this, but we need the functionality and the tools before we can build the world. There is much to come in Exanima and beyond that will be built on this. There are many years of study, planning and also uncertainty behind this, with problems that only seemed to get more complex the more we tried to tackle them. Finally solving its intricacies and developing it into functionality is a huge accomplishment for us. We will continue to monitor and patch the test build, with some additions to role interactions here and there, but we will now focus mainly on finalising and polishing the new content for the full update. The main addition will be a large new area, "The Gardens", which is full of new and different content, but we have quite a few things in the works, some of which may come in smaller updates soon after the big one. If you haven't played the test builds, then there are many big improvements, additions and overhauls throughout the game. We'd also like to remind you that we use Discord to track issues, gather feedback, discuss and provide release notes for patches and hotfixes on the testing branch. If you'd like to contribute to testing and share your thoughts please join our discord server: https://discord.gg/Z5aV2bF Best, Bare Mettle