Droid Engineer Archive

As it stands, as everyone knows, the Protocol Droid in its current incarnation is completely without usefulness (thought the Advanced Protocol Droid does allow for 2 modules). It seems to me that without an enormous overhaul, there are a few things that can be added to the droid to make it a desirable commodity.

Magic 8 Ball
A simple and fun addition to this droid would be a mode that allows you to ask the droid a question and get a cryptic answer according to the personality of the droid. For example, a command like /query could be used, i.e. “/query Will I die if I try to solo this nest of crazed durnis?” Protocol Droid answer: “I believe you could make that assumption, sir.”

Programmable Dialogue
Saw this suggestion on the boards the other day, and love it. Adding the capacity to store preset conversational strings seems like it wouldn’t have a lot of programming overhead, and would save us DEs having to explain what droids do 40 times a day, as we can just save it to our protocol droid and have them tell the customer.

Translator
This would be the most significant and welcome use, but it probably would take a good deal of programming, as the language system would need an overhaul. Protocol Droids should be allow the user to understand all languages, whether through a translated string from the droid, or simply showing the translated text as if you knew the language. The mechanism for this probably wouldn’t be too difficult, but it would require rethinking the entire language system to make it useful. This has been discussed at length on this and other boards, but I believe the BEST solution would be to implement languages as a skill. All non-native languages that you learn count 1 skill point against you, and you would be given the ability to unlearn a language just like any other skill. This would make protocol droids highly sought and true to their place in the Star Wars world.

I'll post this on the SWG Discussion board, too, and see if I can get some Dev attention.

Good luck with that.

If you do get some dev-attention you'll probably just get a comment like "that's a good idea!" and nothing more.





But lets hope for the best shall we ?

I love all three ideas.

Especially the first, just for comedy relief, which was what C-3P0 was mainly good for, in the movies.

Good luck, maybe add these to Gorantoth's wishlist? Since Raph already said they would use that list to, how did he say it? "March through"?

"R2, here's a new strategy.. Let the wookie win..." -

C.

Great ideas...

The programmable dialogue stuff is actually relatively trivial to implement. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but there's quite a decent engine called Eliza that people have been using for years that suits this purpose quite well. It's quite easy to integrate into almost any application and gives quite a fun addition to any environment. I remember being in one environment in the mid 90's (I professionally work in 3D graphics and VR) that had a bartender run using eliza. Heaps of us would gather there, have parties etc, tip the bartender, buy him drinks etc, he'd get drunk and dance around, sing etc. It was a great amusement.


Sox na'Kreyte
DE in training, Bria/Corellia

I recall that Holocron himselfactually posed the 1 skill point languageconcept back towards the end of beta, and he seemed very fond of the idea... but for some reason it still has yet to happen.

Oh! Another feature similar to the Magic 8 Ball would be an Odds command:

/odd navigating past apack of Gurrcatsundetected

"The odds of navigating past a pack of Gurrcatsundetected is 7,320 to 1!"

the odds would most easily be implemented if the estimates were random numbers as opposed to a complex system that can understand what was requested and pull out a real figure.

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Tobar wrote:

Oh! Another feature similar to the Magic 8 Ball would be an Odds command:

/odd navigating past apack of Gurrcatsundetected

"The odds of navigating past a pack of Gurrcatsundetected is 7,320 to 1!"

the odds would most easily be implemented if the estimates were random numbers as opposed to a complex system that can understand what was requested and pull out a real figure.

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Perfect! I love that idea, too!

Magic 8 Ball and Odds... lol that is pretty sweet.

Really cool idea.