Comment by DonHopkins | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DonHopkins | Hacker News Reader

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This demo (starting at 13:06) shows how the SimAntics visual programming language works, and how objects publish advertisements for their available actions (which show up on the pie menus that the user can select, or which the characters can autonomously choose to perform).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs&t=13m6s

Advertisements appeal to characters based on their current motivations (feelings, hunger, etc), their distance from the object, their relationship with the object (so you prefer to sleep in your own bed), and SimAntics scoring functions that can perform arbitrary calculations.

Then it shows how all that works together in the "Food Chain", a complex Rube Goldberg device comprised of many different objects, that compels characters to perform the many sequential steps required to prepare and eat food (when then compels them to poop, which makes them need a shower, which makes them tired, and so on).

The main loop of the "autonomy" algorithm that decides what to do next (if you don't tell them what to do) searches for the top several advertisements with the highest score, and then chooses randomly between them. If they always chose the top scoring best thing to do, then their lives would be too mechanically optimized, lacking in whimsey and spontaneity, and anything the user told them to do would deviate from the optimal path, making their lives less efficient, more miserable.

So for better game play and happier users, we randomly dumbed them down a bit so they needed the user's guidance to have a better life (but we didn't make them so dumb that users couldn't fuck up their lives even more, either).

http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title=SimAntics

> If they always chose the top scoring best thing to do, then their lives would be too mechanically optimized, lacking in whimsey and spontaneity, and anything the user told them to do would deviate from the optimal path, making their lives less efficient, more miserable.

Couldn't they add a "monotony" factor to the SimMotive struct that increases as their daily life becomes too uniform, which in-turn leads to greater overall unhappiness if it's too monotonous, or greater overall stress if their days become entirely unpredictable?

That would cost more CPU for the same result.

The trick of optimizing games is to off-load as much as the simulation from the computer into the user's brain, which is MUCH more powerful and creative. Implication is more efficient (and richer) than simulation.

During development, when we first added Astrological signs to the characters, there was a discussion about whether we should invent our own original "Sim Zodiac" signs, or use the traditional ones, which have a lot of baggage and history (which some of the designers thought might be a problem).

Will Wright argued that we actually wanted to leverage the baggage and history of the traditional Astrological signs of the Zodiac, so we should just use those and not invent our own.

The way it works is that Will came up with twelve archetypal vectors of personality traits corresponding to each of the twelve Astrological signs, so when you set their personality traits, it looks up the sign with the nearest euclidian distance to the character's personality, and displays that as their sign. But there was absolutely no actual effect on their behavior.

That decision paid off almost instantly and measurably in testing, after we implemented the user interface for showing the Astrological sign in the character creation screen, without writing any code to make their sign affect their behavior: The testers immediately started reporting bugs that their character's sign had too much of an effect on their personality, and claimed that the non-existent effect of astrological signs on behavior needed to be tuned down. But that effect was totally coming from their imagination!

They should call them Astrillogical Signs!

The create-a-sim user interface hid the corresponding astrological sign for the initial all-zero personality you first see before you've spent any points, because that would be insulting to 1/12th of the players (implying [your sign] has zero personality)!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffzt12tEGpY

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