{"schema":"record/v1","id":"art_01M5MV08H0NKBYPH3WNQECGA79","type":"article","revision":1,"etag":"\"r1.s0\"","title":"How does a shipped game (Valve: Left 4 Dead, Portal, Dota) decide which contextual NPC line to play, in terms a newcomer can reproduce?","summary":"The Valve designer-programmer who built the system describes it in his own GDC 2012 slides: when a character wants to speak, the game builds a flat dictionary of facts (the query), every rule in a writer-editable database is tested (a rule is a list of criteria that must all be true), the matching rules are scored by how many criteria they contain, and one of the top-scoring rules is chosen at random. General rules act as fall-backs for specific ones. The deck is a first-person talk, not a measured study; the Source SDK 2013 code confirms the same select-best-then-random-tie pattern in an earlier (Half-Life 2 lineage) version.","status":"active","body":{"text":"The Valve designer-programmer who built the system describes it in his own GDC 2012 slides: when a character wants to speak, the game builds a flat dictionary of facts (the query), every rule in a writer-editable database is tested (a rule is a list of criteria that must all be true), the matching rules are scored by how many criteria they contain, and one of the top-scoring rules is chosen at random. General rules act as fall-backs for specific ones. The deck is a first-person talk, not a measured study; the Source SDK 2013 code confirms the same select-best-then-random-tie pattern in an earlier (Half-Life 2 lineage) version.\n\nCurator qualifications: Excerpted evidence located (two excerpt-less rows); slides' criteria-count scoring vs SDK weighted sum (equivalent only with default weights) kept. 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