Esoteric Update #98 - This Was A Triumph

So this week, I knew I'd have a lot on my head, so I decided to perform a little experiment that I've wanted to do for a long, long time now. One that I've been thinking of for a while.

However, because I am also horribly exhausted from what was happening, and primarily from having to work till midnight on a Sunday, I'll try to not talk too much about the whole thing.

So let me just give you the gist of the experiment. I was trying to see if I can build an AI roughly comparable to a state-based machine using almost exclusively formal grammars. It's important because it helps with generating certain things. Primarily, it can be used as an on-the-fly AI for characters during pretty much any kind of scene. In my test, it was used to generate ASMR videos for the Internet, which stems from a really old joke/social commentary we made at some point.

It works really well, much better than I expected, but that might come down to the recent engine changes I've implemented giving me far more control over everything happening during non-terminal symbol resolution. The end effect is that I can get complex AI behaviours almost without programming. Of course, writing formal grammars is still a bit of technical work, but it means that everything that happens is purely based on data and how that data is presented to the player.

I guess the easiest way to explain it is that traditionally, you'd have code that selects a hairbrush and then output text based on that selection. Here selecting the hairbrush happens as a consequence of the text being written to the view. The difference might seem unintuitive or meaningless, but if you work with the system, it offers a very different, more dynamic way of handling many things.

Anyway, I need to rest today and maybe tomorrow, but after that, I'm back to writing more conversations for Cornelius. The ASMR stuff can wait for another day or perhaps I can mostly give that work away to someone else.

Right now, I'm not in a good state, and I assume this update might seem like rambling. I can't help it; I am completely out of it for the moment.