Pixel Crushers Forum

Hey Tony,

First off, thanks for the update! I also noticed you updated the manual and I appreciate that Still loving Love/Hate!

I was thinking about my characters having neuroses, and wondering how I might handle that. So far, anything involving other people is easy. For instance, if a character is afraid of women, just have a high Fear Relationship Trait towards anyone with the parent faction "Women." However, when involving the self, things like guilt and negativity towards one's own actions, I'm having a little bit of trouble.

I was wondering how you might suggest I handle a character reacting towards themselves. My first thought is to just do something like making some deeds (like Guilt) have both Actor and Target be the same character, and perhaps have those deeds triggered by other deeds (like Steal). Though I'm wondering if that would even work, or if there's a better or more straightforward way to handle that.

Thanks!

Hi,

Don't bother updating to 1.83 yet. I like your thinking. I'll put out a new update soon with a checkbox that allows characters to witness their own deeds. Currently characters don't witness their own deeds. When it's available (by early next week on the Pixel Crushers site), I'll also post a proof-of-concept scene here.

Excellent! Thank you! I'm looking forward to the update!

I was thinking about it more, and I figured there should probably be a way for a Faction to have a relationship with itself. For instance if someone doesn't like who they are (self-loathing), or perhaps if they absolutely love who they are (like a narcissist), having a relationship affinity score towards themselves might be one way to handle that.

Also, Personality Traits are very useful for dealing with other people, but again regarding the self, I'm wondering how to accomplish representing what someone likes to happen to themselves, rather than liking the general idea of something.
For example masochism, where someone doesn't like the idea of cruelty in a general sense, but loves being treated cruelly. Another example is someone starved for affection or compliments. Perhaps they like don't care much for kindness in a general sense, but they really love and crave being praised or treated kindly.

Perhaps each personality trait could have a value for "Towards Self" and a value for "Towards Others"? Or maybe even a completely different model not involving personality traits? There's probably a better way to handle that. Any ideas?

Factions can already have relationships to themselves. (If a faction doesn't have a relationship to itself, it's assumed to be 100% positive.) Here's a demo scene for self-loathing, in which I gave the character ("Player") a relationship with -50 affinity to itself:

LoveHate_SelfLoathingExample_2016-08-10.unitypackage

Before you play the scene, you'll need to update to Love/Hate 1.83 first and then import the patch from the Love/Hate customer download page. Enter your Unity Asset Store invoice number on the page to access the downloads. The patch adds a "Can Witness Self" checkbox to the Faction Manager so characters can witness their own deeds.

Rather than "Towards Self" and "Towards Others", it may be better to assign a custom EvaluateRumor delegate. Or maybe in the context of your example "Cruelty" is really two separate traits: "Sadism" and "Masochism". I'll give this more thought.

Neat! That's exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. Thanks for setting up that example scene!

Hmm regarding the affinity for "actions towards self" vs "general idea of the actions," I'm not sure that a custom EvaluateRumor method would accomplish a distinction there, unless I'm missing something about how EvaluateRumor works. As for splitting Cruelty into Sadism and Masochism, it still would be a matter of how much the actor likes those general concepts rather than if they like those concepts in regards to themselves. In other words, they wouldn't be able to be a hypocrite.
However, I could just treat some Personality Traits, like Masochism, as things that the actor likes for themselves rather than outwardly in general, though I feel like that would go against the idea of Personality Traits in the first place, which are supposed to be what characters value, not what they do themselves.

Good points. It may be that separate personality trait values "Towards Self" and "Towards Others" would be best. Or, working within the existing model, maybe separate personality traits "Cruelty To Self" and "Cruelty To Others" would be clearer. I'll have to play around with this a bit. If you have any other ideas, please feel free to share them!

Hey Tony,

I've been thinking about this all morning and I think I found a better solution.

So, first off, the "Towards Self" and "Towards Others" distinction for Personality Traits is probably not the best idea, especially since some wouldn't actually make sense with a "Towards Self" flag, such as with more general ideas like morality or artistic interest (I'm using the detailed OCEAN 5 template). As a result, we'd have some personality traits that wouldn't be consistent with the others, and that would probably lead to bad design.

Now instead of making a distinction in the uses of specific personality traits, what if there was a distinction in the target of deeds? (This is probably what you were suggesting earlier with the custom EvaluateRumor method, so sorry if I missed your intention there). What if a deed had different impact, aggression, and trait values depending on if the target is someone else or if the target is you? This would also allow for situations such as someone not liking stealing in general, but absolutely violently hating when something is stolen from them.

In this way, we could customize how people react to witnessing a deed VS having themselves be the target of the deed, and that would allow for the types of characters and situations we discussed in the previous posts. And we wouldn't need to change how personality traits work at all!

This is a typical use case (except I'm using the extreme values -100 and +100 for simplicity):

Adam has +100% affinity to himself.
Adam has +100% affinity to his daughter.
Adam has -100% affinity to his nemesis, Bob.
Adam dislikes stealing.

If Charlie steals from Adam or Adam's daughter, Adam will feel upset and lost affinity to Charlie.

If Charlie steals from Bob, Adam will feel happy and gain affinity to Charlie.

Now let's say Adam secretly feels guilty that he inherited his millions and doesn't deserve it.

You could model this by giving Adam -100% affinity to himself. This way Adam will feel happy and gain affinity to Charlie when Charlie steals from him.

However, this is an all-or-nothing. If Doug punches Adam, this will also make Adam happy now.

Frankly I'm not sure yet how best to model this. If the Steal deed has a "Towards Self" and "Towards Others" distinction, this would apply to all characters, not just freaks like Adam. I'll experiment with it this weekend and let you know what I come up with. It may require overriding the EvaluateRumor method for Adam to handle the Steal deed specially. If that's the case, I'd make it a general-purpose override functionality so you could use the same thing to, say, configure a Leopold von Sacher-Masoch character to enjoy when cruel deeds are done to him.

Right, if someone has -100% affinity towards themselves, then they would utterly despise themselves and probably welcome being punished--not because they like it, but because they think they deserve it. As far as that goes, that would function correctly. People hurt themselves in the real world when they hate themselves.

Regarding deeds though, deeds seem to have a handful of personality traits (for example, stealing has a lawfulness trait), not relationship traits like affinity. What I was suggesting is that a deed have a second or modified set of personality traits for each person the deed targets. Right now, someone will react to a deed the same (if they have the same personality trait values) whether that deed happens to them or if they witness the deed happening to someone else.

Instead, what if they react differently (the deed has modified personality values for them) when the deed happens to them (as opposed to just witnessing it)? In this way, you could even create the concept of bias by increasing the lawfulness value for stealing even further for the person being stolen from. Suddenly, people are weighing the importance of the law heavier when things are happening to them, just like in real life.

But with this same tech you could also represent the abnormal mental conditions like masochism, or even common things like selfishness, and you could even simulate extreme internal vs external locus of control! All these things can be done if we have NPCs reacting to deeds differently if they themselves are the deed's target.