External data files in a scripting language

Scripting Issues
5

Hmm… It’s an expert system toolkit, am I correct?

It looks as though it could be very useful for non-basic AI, indeed. That said, I don’t think that I’m planning on building AIs that call for anything as specific as an expert system - for now, at least, the sort of “on-event behaviour” that I was talking about is probably going to be something as simple as:

on_get_shot:
     change_state: angry
     switch_weapon: big nasty gun

or

on_collision:
     if impacted is poppy
          change_state: asleep

Where being “angry” just has the creature charge blindly (if quickly) at the player firing rapidly.

Very, very simple AI, in other words. :wink:

I’m not sure how it would apply to the storage of such things as weapon characteristics, however… (Unless I’ve missed something, of course.) I don’t see why I would keep item templates in the same way as such an expert system - I would think that separate files would work better (with the characteristic file perhaps referring to the behaviour file).

Hmm… I wonder, however, whether an expert system might have some use in the design for an adventure game puzzle system… I can see the possibility for puzzles that make use of expert systems, I think, but I wonder whether the design of the overall puzzle system (which keeps track of actions to be taken, whether or not the puzzle has been solved, etc.) might benefit from it…

Probably not, I don’t think. It may well bear some further thought, but I suspect that a state machine is better for that…

All of that said, thank you very much for mentioning it - I’ve bookmarked the SourceForge page that I presume to be its homepage. It could well come in handy in the future, whether for AI, as a puzzle tool, or some other use. :slight_smile: