RealMemory is our second in a line of projects designed to give independent realism to game characters. Like the Extreme AI Personality Engine, RealMemory gives your NPCs a chance to be a little more human, react in human-like ways, and provide your players with a more immersive game experience.
With RealMemory, your NPCs have human-like memory systems, complete with short-term and long-term memories. They can remember, forget, and distort memories, suddenly remember a “forgotten” bit of information when given contextual clues, and react to emotionally charged memories. They can also store short “stories” as simple memories to supplement the STM and LTM systems.
Think of an NPC at the scene of a crime, having just witnessed a murder. With RealMemory, the NPC will be able to remember some of the events more than others, some items more clearly, some with great emotion, not remember some clues at all, and misremember others. And different witnesses will remember events and things differently. “No, really, I’m SURE he had orange hair and a moustache!” “He couldn’t have. I remember his face being as smooth as a fresh sheet of ice.” And so forth.
RealMemory bases some of its algorithms on NPC personality traits, so ideally you should have a personality engine like Extreme AI to pass on those values. If you do not pass any personality values to RealMemory, it will use default values and, while still working, won’t be customized to each character in quite the same way.
Some specific things you can do with RealMemory:
• Give NPCs short-term memories that can store a limited amount of information that decays or is strengthened and moved into the long-term memory in ways similar to human STM
• Remember in LTM any number of memory concepts, tied together into related concepts and properties thereof; for example, “Jeffrey” is a memory concept that is part of the overarching concept “person” and has “eyes” that are “green” (or are they “blue”?)
• Give memories emotional ties
• Distort memories
• “Forget” (lose access to) memories
• Use contextual clues to “jog” an NPC’s memory
• Associate stories with memory concepts
You have control
As with our other products, we try to give you as much control over the actual processes occurring as you might want, from allowing the NPC’s mind to churn on its own to using only the bits you like. If you don’t want to use the short-term memory functions, that’s fine—you can inject memories directly into the LTM. If you’d like some memories to be stored permanently, with no distortion or obfuscation, that’s fine, too. And at its simplest, you could choose to use only the Stories a character knows and not individual memories. But if you want the NPC’s mind to run on its own, from STM to LTM to forgetfulness and distortion to everything else, you can have it run more-or-less automatically. You do need to provide the information to the STM (you have to be the NPC’s senses, more or less), and you tell the NPC how often to perform “maintenance checks” on her memory (as she cannot tell whether days or years have passed in the game world since her last check, unless your game is continuously in real time), but otherwise the processes can work on their own.
You can check out the User Manual and the Quick Start guide before buying.
You can upgrade to the Extreme AI/RealMemory Bundle for a discount! See our site for more info.
