DarkForge on 2/5/2006 at 11:10

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Well if you haven't done so already, then activating the Talk command is a good way of doing this. To do so, you'll need to find the User.ini file, (in the DeusEx\System folder), open it up and then make a quick change to it.

Scroll down the file a bit until you get to the section where all your commands/key bindings are listed. Some letters will have nothing after the = sign and so these are free to bind to whatever you want. So find an empty letter and after the equals add in Talk (any free letter will do, although personally I always bind it to the T key - makes sense). Save the changes to your file.

Now when you're in the game (menu or actually playing it), pressing T should bring up the word Say in white at the bottom of the screen. Delete this Say, then you're free to type in the command to launch whatever mod you want.

Hope that helps. :)

demagogue on 6/5/2006 at 21:57

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An aside (not totally), I'm still waiting for a FPS game that really makes *good* use of the console to talk to or otherwise interact with NPCs (not bad use; may as well not do it at all than do it poorly).

And I always had a game like DX in mind when I thought about this (although I thought its menu based conversation system was elegant and better for the game that DX was, so I wouldn't change DX itself).

But it's interesting to know that I wasn't alone in my intuition and it actually was put into DX, although not implemented. (and by the way, has there been any exploration of how far they got with this feature? Can you actually say anything to NPC through it, or hack something to use it for mods, and if so, is there a tut that explains it?)

But Warren Spector has said similar things often, that he'd like better NPC interaction, so it's not so surprising.

I think, though, that the state of AI just isn't good enough yet to make in-game speech worthwhile in FPSs. I feel like we're still basically at the stage of 1985 IF on that. It makes me wish developers would invest as much in AI and NPC-interaction as they do on physics and lighting and graphics rendering. I personally think that speech-centric NPC interaction, if it could really work, would be a major breakthrough in first person gaming ... certainly would make them more interactive, engaging, and more story-driven.

demagogue on 7/5/2006 at 17:51

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I think you answered my question, but just a clarification ... I knew that the console was already part of the Unreal engine, just like it's part of just about every engine.

I also understand that a conversation system would be separate from the console system. I remember asking the Darkmod team if they could integrate a conversation system into the D3 console and they went through the same patient explanation that it's not as easy as it sounds and would require a whole lot of separate coding, and nothing in the console functionality itself would get you anywhere.

That's actually *why* I was surprised that DX had anything like that at all that was needled into the console system with a "say ..." function. That's exactly what I was asking the darkmod team for in D3.

Knowing that, *then* my question was whether the conversation system in DX is actually *functioning*, or if it's just an "empty" command, something they thought about, put in a placeholder, and then abandoned. I know you can't get any convo fxnality through the console per se, but what about this convo system of DX?

I gather from your answer that it's not really functioning (certainly not in an easily modifiable format) and couldn't be put into mods, as you say, "without a large quantity of additional overlaid code" to get it up-to-speed in the way you'd want it to work for a mod. So effectively, it's a dead fxn for FM'ing purposes, with just the "say..." shell remaining.

I know about Alicebot. Actually, since I did a significant amount of computational linguistics, while I don't know tons about programming generally, I do actually know quite a bit about (at least the logic of) language parsing and computational semantic (knowledge trees, etc). It's the one area of AI that I can sort of follow.

That's actually why I was hoping I could get my hands on a game where I could get a "say" function rigged into the console system and then toy with a convo system on my own. And when I read that DX has something like that, it sparked my curiosity. If you know a way to get a look at the code for the DX convo system I'd like to have a peek, but I fear it's all locked away in code we can't access. By now, though, if I'm going to all the effort, I'm more interested in trying my hand a rigging a convo system into a newer engine like Doom3 (a la Darkmod). But it still would be nice to see what DX has.

As for:

All I can do is nod and say 'word'.

demagogue on 7/5/2006 at 19:57

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Oh, right, seems obvious now.