I’ve spoken to Nara Malone a few times now. Nara is an author, a storyteller and storytelling is something I’m somewhat passionate about. Back in June Nara showed me around OpenSim and gave me some insight into how they were using NPC’s. Things have progressed since then.
On November 7th – 8th An Adventure Game in Open Sim will be launched. Nara informed me that the team behind this immersive storytelling projects includes 25 creators from various grids, including Second Life. They will be exploring stories told with NPCs. Here’s a trailer :
The key thing to note with a project like this is how much collaboration there is between different people. Coders, designers, storytellers are all working on this project, adding their expertise to create the whole and it looks absolutely fascinating.
One of the tools used is The Story Sequencer, Nara talks about it more here.
In a blog post on this project, Nara states :
Traditionally group stories are crazy-quilt tales lacking a common thread or coherence. That didn’t happen with Immersive Edge. I’m still in awe of what this team effort produced. We have all learned and grown skills and craft over the course of this project that we now take back to our own grids. The weekend we launch we will be giving presentations on the tools developed to create Immersive Edge and gifting them to the Opensim community. This is why the hypergrid is so important to Opensim.
The NPC’s in these stories are real NPC’s, they aren’t people playing the avatar :
These are not human-driven avatars but created by simple scripts that rez the characters and walk them though a scene saying their lines in local chat as they tell the story and invite visitors to help them solve their problems, giving you the opportunity to be a coprotagonist in this interactive tale.
I’m not quite sure how simple the scripts are but I have seen how easy it is to use the systems in OpenSim to create NPC’s, it’s pretty damn impressive.
I’m hoping to catch up with Nara during next week, before the adventure launches so I can get some more in depth information, for now, here’s another video.
In 2011 there was already an impressive range of tools to create and make npc act like if they had some one behind them, i can not even imagine the progress made till now.