Ted Southard's Page

This post is from my blogs on the GarageGames site:

I wanted to withhold my post until the demo level was built, but alas, my uber Alienware laptop is puking bluescreen-hex into my lap every time I try to use Constuctor (or trueSpace, or Age of Conan, or WoW- occasionally). So, a new task on my list is to fast track a new laptop that doesn't go nova on me when I make DX calls more complicated than what Solitaire needs (I'm sure that's next on the blue-screen list).

In any event, I've been able… Continue

Or not, if you plunged your +2743409 Sword of Everlasting Beatdown into his chest. But that wasn't even the point of your adventure. It was the journey to get to that moment of defeating the big bad NPC... At least, it would be if you weren't playing that story out in an MMO, where 50,000 people had played it out before you...

My latest blog is straddling the fence between a dev blog and a rant. I had the very cool opportunity to get to sponsor this years IMGDC in Minneapolis, Minnesota (kudos… Continue

This is probably going to be a shorter update than the last one...

I re-architected the part of the dialog database that allowed me to provide multiple answers to single questions based on "scoring". Basically, that was limited in an approach that relied on a database structure, and I needed to go well beyond what that could provide. Instead, I changed a thing or two and now i can do several things stemming from dialog interaction. One of which is checking for which answer to give, like the pre… Continue

Yeah, it's time for another update on this weird chat interface that I'm developing. To give a basic overview, I am developing a chat interface that will allow players to converse with NPC's in an MMO world with the following goals/restrictions/features:

1) Must be scalable (this is an MMO we're talking about).
2) Must not use parsed language or grammar. This is due to bad grammar, bad language, misspellings, and localization, which would mean rewriting all of those other algorithms.
3)… Continue

Honestly, it's not like they watch the game or anything... But still, chatting with an NPC can add a new dimension to gameplay, and while Interactive Fiction has been tackling and trying to drag that particular quarterback to the ground for decades now, MMO's have largely forgotten all about it...

In my last blog, I discussed some of my ideas for getting dialog with NPC's back into MMORPG's (or even plain MMO's, for those that aren't RPG's), and here's a very quick and very dirty version of the… Continue