Rob Bartel of Bioware on some AI for the NPC dialogs for NWN

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(Originally posted by Sylvus Moonbow)

"Outside of my tasks here at BioWare, I also do some writing for theatre. My current play, strangely enough, has a lot to do with ELIZA, Douglas Hofstadter, EMI (a musical composition program), AARON (a robot that paints in an impressionistic style), and Alexey Pajitnov (creator of Tetris). It involved a lot of really interesting research but I must say, from first-hand experience, that ELIZA is a pretty thin veneer (she's a character in the play and wrote her own lines). Also, chatbots rely heavily on linguistical and grammatical analysis. That means that a bot programmed for English will not be able to interpret German and vice versa. This is the main reason why we won't be using them in Neverwinter. If you wanted to script ELIZA into your own module, however, it ought to be possible (the original program was just 30 lines of fairly simple code)."

And Rob goes on to talk about clothing and armor and a new way of implementing them for NWN:

"For the record, the Gamma UK article is out of date. The more flexible armor system outlined in the Neverwinter Nexus interview is what we're now going with. If you want a spikey shin-guard, throw on a spikey shin-guard. If you want some more 'plain-jane' or historical, use that piece instead. Want your wizard to have metal epaulettes on his shoulders, a leather jerkin over his torso, and cloth sleeves and leggings, and chain boots, go ahead. There are plenty of suit-making possibilities within the toolset, and the end result is still treated as per the 3rd Edition rules: a single suit of armor or clothing, with associated AC, Armor Check Penalty, and Arcane Spell Failure values compiled according to its component pieces."