Forum Rules ---- Forum Search ----

Return to “Games”

Display posts from previous
Sort by
Post

Human Orbit

  • Thu Jul 31, 2014 9:47 pm
    • #1 by Flatfingers
    As usual, courtesy of Rock Paper Shotgun, here is another unusual game.

    Human Orbit says it will make you the sentient AI of a space station inhabited by 100 or so NPCs, each with their own personalities, for you to manipulate as you will.

    Their website is extremely sparse at the moment. Here's about all it says right now:
    Human Orbit is a sci-fi social simulator set aboard a remote space station orbiting a distant planet. There are many mysteries surrounding the satellite’s purpose and the alien planet below, but the most powerful stories are those of the crew.

    As a sentient AI, you take control of a simple droid able to explore the space station and access its communications network uninhibited. Gather information, discover emergent stories, and – if the fancy takes you – take control of the station and those aboard it.

    Do you want to expand the research labs and study relics found on the planet’s surface? Hack into the Captain’s personal log? Or perhaps you’d rather help two contentious members of the community overcome their differences to be together?

    The fate of the station and its crew is in your hands. At least, it would be if you had any.
    Key Features Include:
    • Advanced AI System
    • Procedurally-generated storytelling
    • 100 unique and complex characters, each with their own personalities and histories.
    • Immersive 3D world created by Dan Raihert (Environmental artist on Dead Space 3, The Sims 3)
    • Atmospheric SFX by Eli Hason (Senior Sound Designer on Thief [2014])
    • Node Based Dialogue Editor
    • Modding Tools
    Some of those sound rather familiar. (Procedurally generated? Node-based editor? Modding tools?)

    I think I will be watching this one.
    Post

    Re: Human Orbit

  • Thu Jul 31, 2014 11:19 pm
    • #2 by Hyperion
    Daisy, Daisy
    give me your answer do
    I'm half crazy
    All for the love of you!
    It won't be a stylish marriage,
    I can't afford a carriage
    But you'll look sweet upon the seat
    Of a bicycle built for two.
    Image
    Challenging your assumptions is good for your health, good for your business, and good for your future. Stay skeptical but never undervalue the importance of a new and unfamiliar perspective.
    Imagination Fertilizer
    Beauty may not save the world, but it's the only thing that can
    Post

    Re: Human Orbit

  • Fri Aug 01, 2014 2:03 am
    • #3 by Flatfingers
    Hyperion wrote:Daisy, Daisy
    give me your answer do
    I'm half crazy
    All for the love of you!
    It won't be a stylish marriage,
    I can't afford a carriage
    But you'll look sweet upon the seat
    Of a bicycle built for two.
    I have watched computer scientists cry during that scene.

    Actually, when I think of humans being manipulated by a sentient AI, I'm imagining something a bit more like "Why don't you go into this test chamber? Someone said there was cake. You wouldn't want to miss that."

    Here's hoping the Human Orbit folks reveal a bit more of the design of their game soon.
    Post

    Re: Human Orbit

  • Fri Aug 01, 2014 11:39 am
    • #4 by Hyperion
    Yes, it does look interesting. I wonder if it is detailed enough so that I can break up relationships, getting a person to kill themselves, have all the other people start grieving about it, and then repeat...I wonder how many I could do that to before they know something's up... if they knew at all.
    Image
    Challenging your assumptions is good for your health, good for your business, and good for your future. Stay skeptical but never undervalue the importance of a new and unfamiliar perspective.
    Imagination Fertilizer
    Beauty may not save the world, but it's the only thing that can
    Post

    Re: Human Orbit

  • Sat Oct 18, 2014 12:02 pm
    • #7 by ProceduralJOYE
    Hallo, I'm Joe Yeates, the technical lead at Autelia.
    Hyperion wrote:Yes, it does look interesting. I wonder if it is detailed enough so that I can break up relationships, getting a person to kill themselves, have all the other people start grieving about it, and then repeat...I wonder how many I could do that to before they know something's up... if they knew at all.
    Yes, we've not implemented the suicide mechanic yet but that will be possible. Actually, even in our current internal builds we are able to break up relationships between NPCs. I think that adopting this tactic would probably have a very negative effect on the station as a whole though! Could end up being a bit of a disaster if everyone in a life-critical department is too depressed/dead to work. :cry:

    Sorry for necroing this thread, but I wanted to let people who are interested know that the devblog is live at humanorbit.com.
    Also, if you have any questions about Human Orbit then please feel free to ask here in this thread. I'm watching this thread, so I will be happy to answer any questions that you have as best as I can.

    Cheers.
    Post

    Re: Human Orbit

  • Sat Oct 18, 2014 5:32 pm
    • #10 by Flatfingers
    Hi, Joe! Thanks for coming by with this update.

    So far, the blog entries for Human Orbit have been amazing. I'm especially impressed with the design of the NPC conversation system, which already seems to be producing both sentences and full exchanges that are very natural-looking. And even though the system of SpeechAct+SpeechOperator seems very effective as it is, especially with Subjects, Generic Subjects, Hints, and NPC knowledge, it looks like the system may be easily extended for special conversational modes. Really nice-looking work!

    I have plenty of questions, of course. :) I'm still looking forward to seeing some discussion of the high-level flow of a game -- what a typical play session might look like, and the USPs delivered by a complete play-through.

    But for now, I'd be happy to know a little more about the functionality of the world of Human Orbit. Letting NPCs interact with each other at a high (what they think/feel/want) level is something I'm very much looking forward to exploring, but what about the medium (what they do) level?

    There's an old saying: great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people. In reality, of course, we all talk at all these levels... but there are still some clusterings that can be seen. So I wonder: to what extent will the world of Human Orbit allow NPCs to do things, which then become fodder for personal conversations?

    In other words, how much complexity will there be in the places and objects with which NPCs can interact?

    If the gameplay is mostly about NPCs talking to each other about pre-built subjects (with some player manipulation), I would still be likely to play that game. But I'm hoping the world itself -- because it's got enough affordances for NPCs to interact with -- will provide a large number and variety of subjects as dynamic inputs to NPC conversations. That way they can talk to each other about not just people, but events and ideas as well, resulting in a stronger connection between the player and NPCs. I think there may have been hints that the space station of Human Orbit might provide some world-interactivity, but I'd be interested in anything you might want to add to that, or correct any mistaken impressions I've somehow dreamed up.

    That's all pretty Simulationist of me. So the practical follow-up question would be: and what kinds of in-game actions for the player would be enabled by giving NPCs a broad range of world-interactions? How do you create a highly interactive world without shifting the focus of the game too much toward something like Sim-control gameplay instead of indirect conversational manipulation?

    Finally, there's the brief mention that, as the space station's "AI," players will be able to direct robots to accomplish various things. That reminds me strongly of Michael Berlyn's wonderful Infocom text adventure Suspended. One of the brilliant aspects of that game was that the different robots you could control had different capabilities and personalities. Auda could hear; Waldo could manipulate; Iris could see; and Poet could give information expressed in creative and analogical language. This didn't just make for satisfying mechanical gameplay -- the strong personalities of each robot gave the game a wonderful aesthetic that drew players into the story.

    Is anything similar to that being considered for Human Orbit? I'm not normally a fan of copying features of previous games, but this might be a worthwhile exception (if you're not already planning something similar). Somehow I think most of us who remember Suspended would be happy to see that part of it in a fresh game that many of today's gamers can enjoy.

    If you feel like commenting on any of these, great; if not, also fine, and I'm very much looking forward to Human Orbit just based on what's been shown so far. Good luck!
    Post

    Re: Human Orbit

  • Sat Oct 18, 2014 11:41 pm
    • #12 by Hyperion
    ProceduralJOYE wrote:Hallo, I'm Joe Yeates, the technical lead at Autelia.
    Hyperion wrote:Yes, it does look interesting. I wonder if it is detailed enough so that I can break up relationships, getting a person to kill themselves, have all the other people start grieving about it, and then repeat...I wonder how many I could do that to before they know something's up... if they knew at all.
    Yes, we've not implemented the suicide mechanic yet but that will be possible. Actually, even in our current internal builds we are able to break up relationships between NPCs. I think that adopting this tactic would probably have a very negative effect on the station as a whole though! Could end up being a bit of a disaster if everyone in a life-critical department is too depressed/dead to work. :cry:

    Sorry for necroing this thread, but I wanted to let people who are interested know that the devblog is live at humanorbit.com.
    Also, if you have any questions about Human Orbit then please feel free to ask here in this thread. I'm watching this thread, so I will be happy to answer any questions that you have as best as I can.

    Cheers.
    First, it is a pleasure to see a response from the developer on this.
    I read the dev blog, and find the structure of the dialogue system interesting, but I am rather curious as to how the crew will observe their situation and turn those observations into communications. Certainly there is a lot which goes into even a relatively throw-away sentence. For example

    "Drinking cinnamon tea like this, wrapped up in a blanket, the lights dimmed, the heater purring, and jazz playing softly in the background reminds me of my grandmother and warming up by the fireplace with her."

    There is in such a sentence a statement of one's present situation, a listing of sensory and environmental conditions and their connection to a memory. However in that same sentences, there are a lot of interpretations too. The lights are dimmed and enhance the pleasurable mood, while in another situation dim lights may be very bad; The heater is purring rather than being noisy; and overall the tone of the sentence is positive not because of the situation, but because of the memory it conjures. There are certainly individuals who would be in the exact same situation, drinking cinnamon tea in a dark room, with a heater and jazz breaking the silence, who because they have no fond memories of grandmother and her fireplace may find the situation merely pleasant, or maybe even unpleasant because they would rather be doing something else, or there may be problems so large that they wouldn't even pay much attention to the tea and the jazz.

    So given those various ways to interpret the same situation, how would another crew member in the same situation sans grandmother memory read and respond to the above sentence? In some cases, silence would be a perfectly appropriate answer, in other cases something along the lines of "yeah, this is really nice." would also work. However responses such as "The Cinnamon is too expensive but they didn't seem to have any green tea in the mess hall" would be awkward and could ruin the mood of the first person, and may spark a chain of dialogue that ends the relationship. While the response of "You need to stop laying about all the time and do some work around here" would almost certainly ruin the mood of the first person, but might be more in line with the sort of dialogue your system presently shows.

    Again though, any of those responses are interpretations of the situation. The other crew member isn't really paying as much attention to the jazz and the tea, and certainly isn't paying attention to grandmother, they are paying attention to a fellow crew member reminiscing about the past, who is also not doing something else which they may feel is more important, like being practical with their finances or taking too much time not working. How does the system handle these sorts of interpretations, or is this entire idea a bit too subtle?
    I think that adopting this tactic would probably have a very negative effect on the station as a whole though! Could end up being a bit of a disaster if everyone in a life-critical department is too depressed/dead to work. :cry:
    Isn't that the point? :) you have to play therapist when people need help, assuming you want to help out at all, or you can throw a wrench into someones life at just the right moment and bring the whole station to ruin.

    Also one last note, perhaps Josh spoils us with his constant talking about every little thing in LT's development, but your blog seems a little sparse. There are plenty of areas which sound very interesting, but other than a brief description of what is planned, nothing more is said of them, it would be nice to see some more of that. :)
    Image
    Challenging your assumptions is good for your health, good for your business, and good for your future. Stay skeptical but never undervalue the importance of a new and unfamiliar perspective.
    Imagination Fertilizer
    Beauty may not save the world, but it's the only thing that can
    Post

    Re: Human Orbit

  • Mon Oct 20, 2014 12:09 pm
    • #13 by ProceduralJOYE
    Cornflakes_91 wrote:dont concern yourself with necroing
    necro ahead! :wave:
    Thanks. :wave:
    Flatfingers wrote:Hi, Joe! Thanks for coming by with this update.So far, the blog entries for Human Orbit have been amazing. I'm especially impressed with the design of the NPC conversation system, which already seems to be producing both sentences and full exchanges that are very natural-looking. And even though the system of SpeechAct+SpeechOperator seems very effective as it is, especially with Subjects, Generic Subjects, Hints, and NPC knowledge, it looks like the system may be easily extended for special conversational modes. Really nice-looking work!
    Thank you. Two questions that I always ask myself when I'm working on something are "Is this simple?" and "Is this extensible?", so I'm glad that's coming through. If you're interested in reading more about Speech Acts and the extent to which they can be used to categorise/describe complex communications then you may be interested in reading a little about John Searle's Speech Act theory. :geek:
    Flatfingers wrote:There's an old saying: great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people. In reality, of course, we all talk at all these levels... but there are still some clusterings that can be seen. So I wonder: to what extent will the world of Human Orbit allow NPCs to do things, which then become fodder for personal conversations?
    To quite a good extent. Obviously, NPCs all have their own jobs and activities that they partake in as part of those jobs - speaking in generic terms, this already provides fodder for communication to do with their work schedules, their departmental objectives, their remuneration (and negotiation thereof), their personal career objectives, and so on. Then, on top of that, there is additional room for them to converse about their actual activities - some of the more dull departments might not have a great deal of import to say, but I expect that the exploration and research-oriented departments will be a lot more lively!

    When they're not working, there is plenty of scope for them to discuss their other activities - examples that spring to mind are basic gossip, arranging of dates and extracurricular activities, complaints (or compliments!) about one another, their common causes, their divisive issues, discussion of current affairs and events and so forth.

    There are also events that can take place on ship - contaminated space debris causing viral problems on-board, high-profile visitors to the station and so on - these events may present opportunities or cause problems for the player. It'll definitely give the player something to chew on when they're trying to manage everything else!
    Flatfingers wrote:In other words, how much complexity will there be in the places and objects with which NPCs can interact?
    We use a simple technique (broadcasters) to add complexity to objects and to tie their physical purposes and states into NPC's internal motive and communication systems. It's not a new concept, but it's still used because it works extraordinarily well, is simple to use and is good at creating emergent behaviours.
    A typical object will implement at least broadcasters saying "Use me!", "Talk about me!" and so on - as well as broadcasters for non-standard states ("Fix me!", "Talk about me being broken!") and so on. From there, extra conceptual broadcasters can also be implemented - like, when a water dispenser is used and the NPC drinks the action of drinking can also broadcast "Talk about what I just did!".
    Every time an NPC receives a broadcast like this, they can think to themselves "Do I want to use that?", "Do I want to talk about that?" and so on. They might think "CAN I fix that? No... but I CAN report it..." leading to a chain of responses from a simple broadcast:
    • Object broadcasts "Fix me!"
    • Passerby A reports it as broken.
    • Engineer sends off automated repair droid.
    • Passerby B reports it (separately) as broken.
    • Passerby C reports it as broken.
    • Engineer sends mass email saying "STOP SPAMMING ME about broken object!"
    • Player hijacks droid and goes off to do something else
    • Passerby A complains that it's not fixed yet!
    • Engineer disciplined for high volume of complaints & abuse of mailing system :lol:
    What I find most beautiful is when complexity emerges from simplicity.
    Flatfingers wrote:That's all pretty Simulationist of me. So the practical follow-up question would be: and what kinds of in-game actions for the player would be enabled by giving NPCs a broad range of world-interactions? How do you create a highly interactive world without shifting the focus of the game too much toward something like Sim-control gameplay instead of indirect conversational manipulation?
    That is an excellent question, but I think that if I answer it here then this will end up being one mammoth post! I think I'll ask Karl if he can write up an article about this for the blog. Keep your eyes peeled (but I will let you know when it's up)!
    Flatfingers wrote:Finally, there's the brief mention that, as the space station's "AI," players will be able to direct robots to accomplish various things. That reminds me strongly of Michael Berlyn's wonderful Infocom text adventure Suspended. One of the brilliant aspects of that game was that the different robots you could control had different capabilities and personalities. Auda could hear; Waldo could manipulate; Iris could see; and Poet could give information expressed in creative and analogical language. This didn't just make for satisfying mechanical gameplay -- the strong personalities of each robot gave the game a wonderful aesthetic that drew players into the story.

    Is anything similar to that being considered for Human Orbit? I'm not normally a fan of copying features of previous games, but this might be a worthwhile exception (if you're not already planning something similar). Somehow I think most of us who remember Suspended would be happy to see that part of it in a fresh game that many of today's gamers can enjoy.
    That's fascinating. I've not yet encountered Suspended -I'll definitely be checking it out!
    One thing that I can relate very directly to that is this: The 'normal' state of the player is a floating drone, about the size of a grapefruit. It doesn't have any significant actuators with which it can directly manipulate physical objects. When the player wants to move things around the ship, they can dock to one of a number of maintenance droids that can be driven around the ship. These are larger and have arms that can enable the player to interact more directly with the physical world.
    Flatfingers wrote:I'm very much looking forward to Human Orbit just based on what's been shown so far. Good luck!
    Thank you! :D

    Hyperion - this post is already crazy long and everyone hates walls of text, so I'm going to cut it off here and start writing a separate post to answer your questions.

    Thanks as well, Mistycica and Talvenio - The Human Orbit concept is a little different from most other games, so it's always gratifying when to hear when people are interested. :D
    Post

    Re: Human Orbit

  • Tue Oct 21, 2014 8:26 am
    • #14 by Talvieno
    Oh, you'll find that we at LT love walls of text. The best threads here start with them in fact. :) I'm very, very much interested in Human Orbit - it sounds like it's going to be amazing. The best games (in my opinion) are all about complexity that emerges from simplicity - any game that can do that has my attention.
    Have a question? Send me a PM! || I have a Patreon page up for REKT now! || People talking in IRC over the past two hours: Image
    Image
    Image
    Post

    Re: Human Orbit

  • Tue Oct 21, 2014 1:01 pm
    • #15 by ProceduralJOYE
    Talvieno wrote:Oh, you'll find that we at LT love walls of text. The best threads here start with them in fact. :) I'm very, very much interested in Human Orbit - it sounds like it's going to be amazing. The best games (in my opinion) are all about complexity that emerges from simplicity - any game that can do that has my attention.
    That's good, because I have a tendency to create walls of text. :D
    One of my favourite class of algorithms is those used for flocking, because it's a perfect example of beauty and complexity arising from the simplest rule-sets; especially nice when you can see it mirrored in nature.
    https://processing.org/examples/flocking.html
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VB87K35fim4

    We actually use a similar system to manage object avoidance in Human Orbit. :geek:
    Hyperion wrote:First, it is a pleasure to see a response from the developer on this.
    I read the dev blog, and find the structure of the dialogue system interesting, but I am rather curious as to how the crew will observe their situation and turn those observations into communications. Certainly there is a lot which goes into even a relatively throw-away sentence. For example

    "Drinking cinnamon tea like this, wrapped up in a blanket, the lights dimmed, the heater purring, and jazz playing softly in the background reminds me of my grandmother and warming up by the fireplace with her."
    This is a good example. As you say, it's taking a lot of information from the surrounding environment as well as personal things from both the present and the past and relating them to one another (as a class of positive things).

    Our dialogue system would be unlikely to create an output like the one that you've given above. Our dialogue system is generative, but it takes a directorial approach that prioritises naturalness over verbosity - so when adding content to the dialogue system, the author needs to provide the framework of the sentence. The downside of this is that it does prevent dialogue such as you've given above (unless the dialogue author has written a special case, which is discouraged), but the upside is that it avoids the mechanical sounding output that tends to be generated by systems that are capable of concatenating lists of nouns or sentence snippets.
    We went a little bit into how this directorial approach works in this interview with Indie Game Mag.
    Hyperion wrote:Again though, any of those responses are interpretations of the situation. The other crew member isn't really paying as much attention to the jazz and the tea, and certainly isn't paying attention to grandmother, they are paying attention to a fellow crew member reminiscing about the past, who is also not doing something else which they may feel is more important, like being practical with their finances or taking too much time not working. How does the system handle these sorts of interpretations, or is this entire idea a bit too subtle?
    In general terms, the system is capable of that sort of subtlety. If the dialogue used by an NPC is properly tagged or contains relevant hints, then the NPC to whom they are talking can and may well consider that they are being lazy (dependent upon their own personality).

    There's an example of this kind of subtlety in the blog post "Getting Personal". In that blog post, at one point, Emma got the impression from Sam that he doesn't respect her - the reason that this came up was because Sam offered to help Emma with her job while being completely unqualified to do so. It doesn't show in the text, but Emma has picked up on the subtext of his suggestion and come to the conclusion that he thinks her work is easy. She takes offense.
    The same mechanism can drive the divergent personal interpretations that you've suggested would be good to have.
    Hyperion wrote:Isn't that the point? :) you have to play therapist when people need help, assuming you want to help out at all, or you can throw a wrench into someones life at just the right moment and bring the whole station to ruin.

    Also one last note, perhaps Josh spoils us with his constant talking about every little thing in LT's development, but your blog seems a little sparse. There are plenty of areas which sound very interesting, but other than a brief description of what is planned, nothing more is said of them, it would be nice to see some more of that. :)
    You're right. It is the point. :D

    Josh's updates are incredible! I'm completely serious when I say that we've sat and watched a number of them as a team at Autelia. That level of quality is really something to aim for - but it's a high bar!
    You're right that, at the moment, the blog is quite sparse. We're working on improving that, because it's important to get that info out there (for so many reasons). Well, I'm glad you like what you've seen so far - we're going to be trying hard to keep up with the updates (so keep your eyes peeled ;)).
    Post Reply

    Return to “Games”

    Online Now

    Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 30 guests

    cron