It is an amazing tool. I assumed that there would be a way to put two chatbots together since there could be more than one running at once but the it is nice to have that confirmed. I’ve been reading through the thread on converting AIML to CS and I’m really impressed by the community here. Unity’s community is a great resource but it is too big to be personal.

So far I’ve just been researching and doing some speculative design notes based on what I’ve learned so far but today’s my Friday so I’m looking forward to getting Harry up and running and doing some experiments over the next couple of days.

Is Shroud of the Avatar based on ChatScript? I looked for specific references online but didn’t see anything. Just curious. It would help explain what I’m working on until I get something that can be interacted with up and running.

It certainly appears to be Unity and I recognize some of the Unity store assets they use. From videos of the Wyrmsands map it looks to have been largely constructed with Manufactura K4’s Middle-East pack shown in the YouTube video entitled “Afghanistan”.

Not to my knowledge, from what I’ve read their chat menu system is home grown.  I do know for sure Shroud is unity. If you subscribe to the dev or above lvl you get access to unity assest bundles they periodically make available. They also accept fan submissions of unity assists and some of the coolest stuff in the game has been user contributed.

I’m not surprised about the chat system. One of the reviews (that was otherwise generally positive) the reviewer goes up to an NPC and is going to chat with them and says “let’s see if this works” which didn’t exactly inspire my confidence. Obviously though it doesn’t matter what tech one uses, if the implementation is poor the results won’t be any better.

Remember Shroud of the Avatar is actually pre-alpha still Jeff.  They are opening it up to people _while_ they are doing development.  I think they are still a year or so away from release at least and probably at least a few more releases away from alpha.  Having followed it from the beginning I can say I’m astonished at their progress to date.  But ya, the chat system is still pretty rough.  I do like their keyword highlights for efficiency, but that takes away from some of the fun of figuring out how to say things.  I used to play MUDs back in the day, and kinda miss those open ended weirdly worded worlds - todays video games are generally just special effect theme parks on rails with no soul.

You are right. I think I’m being overly critical because I’m consciously taking the opposite approach and trying to create a fairly general-purpose chat interface first, before applying it to an actual game. But a big part of that is that I see the chat interface as a huge technical risk and managing that risk seems too important to wait until a game is being built, let along waiting to perfect it until the game is opened to the player community. But that’s my bias.