[evandale]

> Even unpredictable NPC needs to have a predictable personality on some level, total randomness isn't fun

tongue in cheek counterpoint: Rimworld players love Random Randy :P

I think it really depends on the game though, but you're right 100% random in an RPG could be really annoying.

Right now I'm into games like Factorio and Captain of Industry and they've both recently had blog posts about how they do terrain generation and CoI stuck out because you can manually plop features like mountains and then it procedurally generates the mountain range[1].

There's been a lot of games recently that seem to be doing procedural land generation, is there not a way this can be applied to AI personalities as well or is there no overlap between them? It kind of feels like procedurally generated personalities should be do-able but it sounds like there's something more going on that complicates that?

[1] https://www.captain-of-industry.com/post/cd-42

[Jensson]

> tongue in cheek counterpoint: Rimworld players love Random Randy :P

Even randy random isn't entirely random, people love it since it sends you big threats, so it is coded to ensure it throws you big threats. If it randomly didn't send big waves people wouldn't like it as much.

"If Randy has not fired a major threat after 13 days, the next Randy fired event becomes a major threat."

https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Randy_Random

> There's been a lot of games recently that seem to be doing procedural land generation, is there not a way this can be applied to AI personalities as well or is there no overlap between them?

I'm certain that is possible, but we don't have nearly as much intuitive understanding how to generate full fledged personalities hooked into an LLM that changes how the character acts and his motivations etc that will actually work well when put in a world and interacting with other NPC's in that world.

Terrain is just really easy to generate well enough, almost everything else is way harder.