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Comment by diyorgasms | Hacker News Reader

I remember playing this game when I was younger, and being impressed by the interactivity of the AI. Though honestly, I mostly just swore at them creatively.

I have to wonder, though, if the game did actually have especially good AI, or if I just wasn't familiar with text-based adventure games enough to recognize Starship Titanic as essentially being one.

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Here's how the AI worked (second-hand, because although I was semi-involved with the game, I wasn't on the dev team).

The original natural language parser was Velocitext, an engine we licensed from Virtus. I say "original" because our devs - mainly the super-smart Jason Williams - put a ton of tweaks and other new code into it, and Douglas ended up naming the new system "Spookitalk" (because it was spookily good).

Here's how to make spookily good AI:

1. When ST came out (late 90s), everyone had basement-low expectations of natural language parsers. These days things are somewhat better with Siri and Wolfram and the like, but back then the best you had - especially in games - were the Infocom and Magnetic Scrolls adventure systems. It turns out that all you need to blow people away is something that's slightly better than that; people expect computers to be useless at this stuff, so when they can occasionally come out with something smart, the impression is huge.

2. Jason and our test lead (Francine) put HUGE amounts of time in putting people in front of the game, recording text entered and the responses, then tweaking, iterating, etc. The AI's job was to parse text, add a little context and then return one of the several thousand pre-recorded responses. By the time the game came out, Jason had it handling the vast majority of things that people were actually likely to type.

But again, the secret: AI doesn't have to be amazing. It just has to be better than you expect at doing the single thing it's meant to do. (See also: Valve's relatively simple soldier AI in the original Half-Life, which was amazing at the time)

Nearly: We worked with one particular coder from Virtus, who was a (very good) NL person, who worked with us to implement the original engine that we and she designed (I've still got my original design docs - at least the ones that weren't written on Groucho Club table cloths…). What made Spookitalk (itself about the fourth title it had) so effective was that we combined the outlook of engineers (who always try to disambiguate) and writers (who play with the ambiguity and 'noise' of natural language) to create an engine that was explicitly focussed on delivering the illusion of intelligence by whatever means - a large proportion of the later work was focussed on just that - handling and interpreting the contextual and colloquial 'noise' around a conversation and using it to deliver appropriately smartarse responses. In that regard, Spookitalk was the spiritual successor to ELIZA.

Thanks for the correction, Richard!

I remember reading somewhere, they tried to make the "AI" but in the end just relied on having a ton of canned responses to questions.

According to wikipedia: The engine incorporates over 10,000 different phrases, pre-recorded by a group of professional voice actors. The recorded phrases would take over 14 hours to play back-to-back.

I have the hint book. One of few games that made it way to the mac in the 90s. Now sadly unplayable.

Not so. The AI was always there. We originally intended to use Text-to-Speech for output but rapidly found that TTS couldn't deliver the vocal nuances and timing required for the experience we wanted to deliver - this after all was a game where humour and quality of writing were crucial - hence the move to pre-recorded chunks. One of the heroic and oft-unsung latter-day development efforts on the game was the design of the pre-recorded chunks for assembly on the fly at play time and the mechanism by which they were assembled and delivered.

Interesting! Thanks.

I relate to the dilemma. When I was playing Half Life as a kid, I remember being blown away by the "smart enemy AI."

These days I find it odd when enemy AI does NOT react in a dynamic, networked way. Interesting how my expectation has changed over the years. I wonder if the same applies for video game graphics, too?

>Interesting how my expectation has changed over the years. I wonder if the same applies for video game graphics, too?

How can you wonder? Isn't it obvious?

Graphics that would leave us impressed in 1985 or 1995 or 2000 are considered nothing to write home about a few years later...

Oh, sorry I wasn't precise- yes, absolutely!

I'm particularly curious about the nature of that 'expectation evolution', and how exactly that works- and how, for example, people not exposed to the earlier work might interact with it.

I'm reminded of an interesting story of a father walking his son through all of video game history: https://medium.com/message/playing-with-my-son-e5226ff0a7c3

I remember my father saying FIFA 1996 graphics "looks like live TV".

While this is true, I find the distinction between graphical fidelity and art style to be important in these matters.

While the graphics of Super Metroid might not be anything spectacular, the pixel art is phenomenal, and replaying it recently I gained a whole new appreciation for how future-proof the art direction in that game is. I think there are many more examples of this out there, too. For instance, people often bemoan early 3d games (Nintendo 64 games especially) for aging horribly. On the whole, that is true. But there are certainly exceptions, such as Majora's Mask, where (again) the art direction saved the game's graphics from the awkward low-polygon limitations of the system.

The sub-pixel movement engine in super metroid is fantastic too. It's what makes the art in that game really sing IMO.

Also they got a bit of help from kubrick ;)

Each mode has a time when it gets "good enough," and everything on top of that is gravy.

IMHO, for 2D, that was achieved with the NES generation. And for 3D, with the GameCube generation. (My son fired up Metroid Prime yesterday on the Wii, and it took me a while to realize it was a GC game, not a Wii game.)

But, yeah, Super Metroid is amazing. I only played it recently (~6 years ago), never the original, and I still enjoyed it thoroughly.

In this particular case note that the Wii hardware is, to a large degree, a straight repackaging of the GCN hardware with a bit more RAM and a higher clock speed. That the Wii is not an extreme graphical advance over its predecessor is to be expected. :)

I do agree with you in general, though. Which isn't to say that graphical advances aren't still perceptible (compare SNES-era sprites to any of the positively gorgeous sprites from Odin Sphere or Rayman Legends), but at some point you cross a threshold where graphics cease being cringe-worthy and start being merely dated. FFVII is a cringe-worthy example, whereas The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion remains breathtaking to behold (as long as you don't look anyone in the face, that is).

Depends on the graphics. Sprite-based games are still perfectly playable; Super Mario World is still gorgeous 25 years after its release.

Meanwhile, polygon-based games show their age really, really obviously. You can see the difference between Madden 2005[1] and Madden 2015[2]. I wonder what Madden 2025 is going to look like. Hilariously, people note that Madden 2005 is probably one of the best in terms of gameplay. I don't think it was until 2013 that they actually tried innovating, and the innovations weren't very good.

[1]http://www.vgu.tv/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Madden-05.jpg

[2]http://oyster.ignimgs.com/mediawiki/apis.ign.com/madden-15/9...

I'll go even farther and argue that the beauty and timelessness of good graphics depends on something else, different from whether they are bitmap-based or 3D or whatever.

Like you say, there are really beautiful sprite-based games; but also the polygon-based graphics of Another World are pretty timeless, and I wouldn't trade them for anything else. On the other hand, I agree the graphics of games such as the original Alone in the Dark haven't aged well at all. I can't explain exactly why I feel different about those two games, but I do. Maybe because the graphics from Another World are highly evocative, and its backgrounds sometimes remind me of something out of a Moebius illustration, while Alone in the Dark's are more tied to technological limitations of its time rather than to artistic decisions.

I feel like the polygon graphics in Another World (or Out Of This World) haven't aged nearly as well, much like Star Fox and Super Mario 64 haven't aged nearly as well as Super Mario World and Chrono Trigger. With Star Fox, Super Mario 64, and Another World, you have to look at them through a lens of "well, for the time..."; they were astonishing at the time, but now they look dated. On the other hand, new sprite-based games are still being made and sold today, as well as romhacks for console-based games.

I don't think this is my nostalgia filter talking; there really was a certain peak at the height of the sprite-based era.

(That said, Out of this World is also amazing for being the work of one person.)

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