Thursday 17 January 2008

Emotion Engine Complete

The emotion engine has gone through some changes, both to make it more efficient and also to make it slightly less predictable.

The emotion engine now includes a randomisation effect to increase or decrease all of the emotions whenever the system is running without input. The idea is, if nothing is happening to the character the emotions should continue to fluctuate and change. If no one talks to you, you still manage to get happier or sadder, don't you?

If you are particularly mean to the test character (called "Larry") he gets extremely sad and struggles to get out of this rut. It seems the emotion engine I've designed may suffer from depression... However, this is probably quite acceptable - if someone kept repeatedly kicking me, I would get quite upset and it would take a lot to make me happier.

Test out "Larry" here. Please comment on this blog if there are any problems!

A quick note for future versions:
It may be interesting for some actions to have longer lasting effects. Such that if something really good/bad happens, it continues to affect the emotions after the initial action. This would be something to work into the overlying program, rather than the emotion engine itself.

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