Pixel Crushers Forum

Hello once again,

I seem to be asking more questions here than most, and I am sorry about that.

But when I was doing my prototypes for how the whole quests would work I ended up with no problems. But right now when I am doing the bulk of the quests in games I hit a dead wall in regards with the requirements. I think that I understand now(after seeing that you have safeguard in the code and my tests failing a lot of times) that you planned the requirements as more of a what should be done before this action can be added to a planner. But as I understood it more of a what should exist, and if possible add those actions that would make this quest possible to the planner, but if there isnt a way to create the quest just ignore this action and continue finding other suitable actions. Currently I have i.e. a couple of actions that you can do with a settlement like bring some goods to it if it is friendly, bring a message if it neutral, do something bad if it is an enemy, etc... and I have domains for enemy, friendly, player faction and neutral settlements. And the problem that occurs is that it exceeds the safe guard when trying to generate quests( I have set the safeguard to low value) and generates a quest for a friendly settlement even though it is an enemy one(all the settlements are in the correct domains). So how can I have requirements for quests working more like offer condition for the non procedural quests? Would it be an easy change or it's completely out of the planned use case? What is funny I've tried it sometimes with checking whether a event happened in the world(event was added as an entity type if it happened recently) and it worked but right now I don't know what to do.

P.S. I don't know If I am using it wrong the whole time( I did went through the tutorials multiple times though) but anyways I wanted to say that as I am creating a battle between factions which is supposed to offer non linear gameplay, I find the procedural quest system a bit... unprocedural for a lack of better word . Not trying to offend or anything just want to provide some feedback really. There is a big chance that I am using it wrong, I am not denying that but some stuff just seemed counter intuitive.. like the requirements one, or the fact that it always generates the best quest all the time( I managed to add some random number to balance it off) when in reality I would expect something procedural to have some randomness when generating quests, i.e. not always choosing the best one but having some variations, there was another thing too but I don't remember right now.

Hi,

Procedural is different from random. Procedural means it's generated by a system of rules. However, the top task on the Trello board is to randomly choose a goal from one of the top X most urgent facts, instead of the top most urgent fact. So that feature is coming soon (in the next update).

If you're exceeding the safeguard value, add more actions, and maybe more types of entities that it can work with. This gives the planner more ways to find a plan. This will also help it find a plan that fits its faction.

Generated quests don't have offer conditions. But each node does have its completion conditions.

I'm planning the next update. If you have any other feature requests, please let me know.

Hi,

Thank you for your reply.

Yes I am fully aware that procedural isn't random, but procedural generation almost always uses some kind of randomness or more precisely pseudo-randomness otherwise it wouldn't have such a big use in content generation. Even in some AI implementation there is some kind of randomness in their choosing of tasks/planners which almost always makes the AI to make more interesting decision.

Anyways it's great hearing that it is one of the planned feature, I look forward to it.

I will try to add more actions hopefully that will fix my safeguard issues.
I don't have anything else right now in terms of feature request but I will write to you If I have an idea in the coming days.

Thank you once again.

Sounds good! I'm planning to release the next Quest Machine update in about 2 weeks. It will contain randomized goals. If you think of any other areas that could use more randomization, please suggest them here.