Braben, 'Technology Five Years From Now', & 2001

VR Golgot

VR Golgot
Ok, this is gonna make some "Elite 4" vets roll their eyes hard, but I just stumbled onto this ancient GDC talk by Brabes, and found it an intriguing window into his old areas of interest. Some of which might still be relevant today ;)

'Technology Five Years From Now' [GDC 2001]

The TLDR is:

He talks about the desirability of things like:
  • Synthetic Voices: For NPC variety, fluid reactions to events etc

  • Character 'Memories': For background NPC behaviours, dialogue alteration, and 'deception' gameplay

  • (& Speech Comprehension: For alternate inputs to the classic '3 menu choices', more 'two way' dialogue etc)

And some even more eccentric stuff, like streaming player expressions onto avatars [36m45s] ;)

Some Excerpts of Note:

On Speech [45m07s]:

Now actor speech is inflexible. It suffers from similar issues to animations. Essentially you can't vary the tone or inflexion with context very readily on actor speech without making it sound completely bizarre. It can also only be used for one character because we're so good at recognising individual actors. If you use it repeatedly you need to record a number of variations, if it's a phrase that is commonly [used], like: "I don't understand that" it really becomes, it grates. And if there's an interruption you either just cut them short or you continue their speech, it feels very unnatural. And that's not would happen in real life.

The other danger with this is it's a one-way traffic. Players are most definitely unable to respond in kind at the moment. They may well curse and swear at their machine but unfortunately it can't hear. And in fact one of the things that's often frustrating with a game, I think it's particularly obvious in games like Zelda, where the responses all lead to the same response anyway. It's either a 'I'll say yes now', or I'll pause and then I'll say yes. Often the flow is single track. Now I accept it's very, very hard to open up a game world to that level of richness where you can have very, very broad tracts [?]. But it is a problem.

Now the other thing of course is that player speech with a microphone is useless without comprehension. Apart from in a multiplayer environment.

Now speech comprehension. Is that a solution? Now there are methods around for speech comprehension that work without training. And, to some extent, work in noisy environments. But they still, as far as the ones that I've seen, don't manage to come across the sort of subtle inflexions that convey sarcasm. And also, from the point of comprehension, getting sarcastic sayings that people use in common speech. People are still going to have to speak in a constricted way. And what it comes down to is that in order to do full speech comprehension, we need to solve the Turing test. Now, I think that's still a long way away...

But that's isn't a reason not to do it. I mean currently we can maybe do a few hundred words convincingly with a character. But that's a lot better than a menu with three entries. And even the games, you tend to forget that you're speaking in game speak, you know, the 'Go North' of adventures still were quite compelling. It is actually an option, in terms of filling in the black areas of the map at the start. Even though it's a poor solution, it may well be better than a menu. As long as it's reliable, as long as you don't have to keep saying the same thing over and over.

Now the flip side to that is speech generation, which is also quite hard. You do need it for tailored responses, to be able to vary tone and inflexion according to the player character, where they are, what they're doing. In other words if a character starts a piece of dialogue, and the player draws a gun, you don't expect the dialogue to continue, impervious. You either expect the guy to start running or hiding. Or at the very least sound rather worried, and say: "Yes I'll open the door for you!!", or whatever.

It's again, as I said at the start, it's an audio parallel to real-time animations in place of pre-planned. And there's a lot of benefit to it that's often not talked about. I think none of us, us included.... it is a frighteningly difficult problem. And the problem is that most of the solutions ends up sounding like Stephen Hawkings anyway.
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On AI [51m30s]:

Most AI I see now is at best a scripted table. The problem with speech is it risks us revealing just how shallow our characters are [laughs]. And that is a real problem. Once you've got speech you've got a much higher quality of interaction, and the player sort of can get to understand what's behind the character. And at the moment they're so two dimensional, it, uh, it's hardly believable. And that dictates the styles of games. If you've got a game style where intrigue, or character relations, are practical. Where you're actually meeting characters face to face. I mean where their face might fill the screen, and you're chatting with them and negotiating with them or whatever. We've got an awful lot to work on before we can get there. An awful lot, I think.

Again we're back to the Turing test. But having said that, people know they're in a game. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be better than it is now [laughs]. In order to have the sort of quality of relationship... I mean the advantage of using characters like animals, is people's expectation is actually lower. And I think, going against one of the things that I said, doing it in a fantasy environment helps as well, because you can have creatures that are presented as being less intelligent.

All a player really needs is a start. They want to believe. It's not like they're out to get us. It's just if we do glaring things, like repeatedly saying the same phrase, then people's imaginations can do the rest.

Now one of the things that I think is really important to this, is of all of the AI techniques I've seen, very few actually seriously consider the character's memories. And this is a very, very good way of getting a character to feel real. Now I don't consider a set of flags to be memories. You know, 'I met this character' or whatever. Which triggers a slightly different response, so it says: 'Hello again' or whatever. I mean that... that helps, but it's not the solution. It has huge storage implications. I mean the sort of things I have in mind is: If the character goes from their house to the town, cross a bridge, they go in to the town. They need to have a local memory of where they've been, rather than just axises pointing to the underlying map, because, let's say Mr Very Bad Person comes along and blows the bridge up, does that character immediately know in its route-finding algorithm that the bridge is blown up? And does this character go and walk across the other bridge if there's a route around? Or do they just not go home because they know the bridge is blown up? I mean that sort of thing is really a problem. Because it means essentially if you're allowing maps to be altered, every character should really, ideally have a local copy of the map. It's issues like that where you think: 'Oh yes, we do memory, we can just keep a list of known events', but essentially their journey is also a list of events.

Now without memory, lies and deceptions are very, very hard to cope with. I mean in fact lies and deception are very hard to cope with anyway, but we need to be able to have the player lying to the game, the game lying to the player. I know games have done lies, but they're done in a very, very shallow way so far, or at least the ones I've seen. And I think that's something that's worthy of a good amount of thought.
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There's other retro-future stuff in there, like inverse kinematics [24m35s], ponderings on whether ray-tracing could move games away from polygons, or indeed benefit gameplay at all [41m00s], and him hating on HUDs [31m15s] ;)

But the above quotes, aside from the voice comprehension stuff, feel like areas that he's tried to revisit more recently....


Does It Really Have Any Bearing on Today?

Seeing as he was so ahead of the tech in his desires then (and seeing as he seemingly tried to enact some of it in The Outsider), I wouldn't be surprised if he still has designs on some of this stuff...

Synthetic voices, contextual conversations. That kinda thing. (Although I’m suspicious that synthetic voices still aren’t quite there yet...)

I've no idea if it'd all coalesce into something intriguing. (And The Outsider ultimately not gaining traction, amongst the publishing travails, is a bit of a worry on that front).

I guess I just like the idea of them pursuing tech that could introduce new twists on gameplay staples... :)

(Even if some of it means they end up building the odd folly ;))

He wraps up the talk by championing the pursuit of the new over the familiar-but-prettier. Will be interesting to see if they can walk that walk at times in the bumper DLC ;)
 
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VR Golgot

VR Golgot
Just as an example of how some of these ideas were seemingly expressed in The Outsider (2005 - 2011):

What Was The Outsider Intended To Be?

TLDR: It was an 'Elite style' open world, with stealth & action options. Story NPCs with simulated 'motivations and aims' would, allegedly, allow players to chose their point of interaction, rather than being locked strictly into a linear 'cut scene' narrative.


Press Release:

Several key proprietary technologies, which Frontier has been developing for some time, make their debut in "The Outsider" and bring the sort of freedom of action first seen in "Elite" bang up to date.
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The game radically enriches the player's experience by abandoning the traditional, prescriptive, mostly linear story of current generation games, and replaces it by simulating characters' motivations and aims.
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Braben interview with CVG:

How did you first get the idea for the game?

David Braben: As with "Elite", I wanted a back story that did not dictate where the player has to go next; I wanted the player to have their options truly open to carve their own path through the world. Of the many scenarios we considered, I think this one works best.

The 'character-driven non-linear' game mechanic sounds fascinating, how will
this work in practice? How will it directly affect gameplay?

David Braben: It brings a great deal of freedom to the player - moving away from the gameplay-cutscene-gameplay-cutscene format, which gives the player little choice but to follow the proscribed path, and it avoids the uncomfortable problem where you might go to a location to meet a character - but the character doesn't yet exist as the cut-scene hasn't yet played.
With this new approach all the characters exist in the game from the start, and their future actions are not pre-determined - their involvement can be pre-empted by the player, making for some interesting gameplay mechanics second-guessing what is going on, and novel replay value. If you're a contrary gamer like me, who is always wanting to go down the side route, to shoot the character giving the long speech-to-camera, to do the unexpected, then this is the only way forward.

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"Outsider will offer a visceral combat experience with high tech weaponry or a more stealthy infiltration involving manipulation of the organizations arrayed against you, or combine those two elements so that you get a more diverse playing experience. One without the other would feel an empty experience before long. There is a further mechanic arching over this - one of intrigue and plotting - exploring the rich story behind your betrayal."
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"The game will of course offer gorgeous graphics - which we all expect on fifth generation titles - but more importantly it radically enriches the player's experience by abandoning the traditional, prescriptive, mostly linear story of current generation games, and replaces it by simulating characters' motivations and aims. This gives the player genuine freedom to change the story outcomes in a way that has not been seen before - each player will get a truly unique, sophisticated, visceral experience rather than simply switching between 'good' or 'evil'."

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"I think improvements in the way characters behave are going to be a key change. How many games out there now can you walk around with a gun held out, and none of the game characters bat the proverbial eyelid? Even when you shoot the guy next to them!"

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"Currently there is little characterisation in games, other than that delivered in the story dialogue and/or cut scenes. By this I mean the character cannot in general be tested by the player other than in utterly superficial ways like how quickly they shoot back at you."

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NB: I can only recover the first page of the original article, but it seems the pull quotes are accurate
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Insider talking to Joystiq:

There were some clever twists with disguises, and how the civilians behaved around you. Some really clever AI (or the illusion of cleverness if you like).
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—

Obviously any Elite expansion would have different criteria (no central backbone narrative, no contained world space, only ‘dialled up’ persistent characters to interact with etc).

But could ‘deception’ gameplay be amped up in NPC interactions? Disguise aspects? Predictable behaviour patterns? They seem like feasible directions of travel, both at ship and player scale. (If more difficult in a proc gen environment :/)
 

VR Golgot

VR Golgot
metatheurgist said:
We had some of that in Frontier. If you sold illegal goods it could turn out to be the cops, and the identikit picture would also change(so they were in disguise). ;)
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Yeah it feels like an amped up version of that could be something they’d go for. Make establishing trust with contacts be more of a thing. (They kind of dabbled with the end-game end of Engineers, exchanging rep for favours etc).

Increasing the odds of deception / shifting goal posts / unfair barter attempts in the first few missions etc. (Maybe even having mission givers shifting allegiances to other minor factions, or turning out to have been plants all along. With dialogue / behavioural hints?). Stuff that would make actually earning trust feel more earned, and a touch more varied? (And make the mission givers a touch more ‘human’)

Also feels like there’s a disguise mechanic potential at ship level. Liveries lowering attention at range. Sensor scrambling / spoofing etc.

All dreamscaping of course ;). But I could see them pursuing some strands like these. Particularly if the human scale gets built out.
 
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VR Golgot

VR Golgot
Parkmaste said:
Wow. What an eye opener, considering all the games FD is putting out now today have gameplay tech that is primitive even by the standards of then, 20 years ago.
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Hah, that's a slightly curdled view ;)

I think some of the tech in the park games is pretty neat and 'modern', even if they're not my kind of thing. (The terrain sculpting, high volume NPC pathing over the same, bonus proc gen clouds etc. The animals are all glossy enough for cartoony fare too).

But I'd definitely agree that the tech Braben was eyeing back then still seems to out-strip what's available now in a lot of cases. Which suggests he may hanker after the impractical or the unlikely at points.

I still think if we see FDev roll the dice on crazier tech, it'll likely be in ED with an expansion though. Not a park game. So I'm intrigued to see if they can do something odd. (Or just endorse someone else's eccentricity, as they did successfully with VR at least ;))
 
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Flin

F
DBOBE has vision, but he and FD are boggled done by the day-to-day of running a listed company and being a publisher as their immediate strategic aim.

Oh, and succeed in management games.
 

ratchet5000

R
Gonna leave this leak here:


Notice name of npc, current system, and npc rank all spoken, how are they going to accomplish this without millions of hours of recording if all three are randomly generated? (slightly rhetorical, also space legs)
 
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VR Golgot

VR Golgot
ratchet5000 said:
Gonna leave this leak here:


Notice name of npc, current system, and npc rank all spoken, how are they going to accomplish this without millions of hours of recording if all three are randomly generated? (slightly rhetorical, also space legs)
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Yeah that vid has always intrigued :D

Could still just be a WIP that never shows up in the game. But imagining it does, there are a fair few possible uses for mission dialogue etc:

  • Bespoke dialogue for limited specialist missions. (The military ‘career’ missions they pondered for ranking with major factions etc)
  • Bespoke audio that gets modulated to sound slightly different in each use. (They discussed back at the same time as synthetic voices, but said it was hard to do at run time back in 2015)
  • Proc gen voices for all missions. (I listened super hard to try and tell if her flat tone actually meant it was proc gen ;). Pretty sure the ‘clonk’ halfway through the audio means it’s a normal recording though :D


Still, would be cool if they could get any of the above fuzzing in our comms channel :)
 
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