Devs should add a feature allowing to you to show your artistic talents. One should be able to write stories, poems and draw paintings. Then there should be a NPC who would evaluate the work and offer a price to buy it.

Interesting stories and beautiful paintings should be valued more than dull ones e.g. "Hamlet" should worth more than "100 bottles of beer on the wall".

Also, your fame and marketing skills should effect prices of your art. When you die, your paintings should get astronomic values.

Writing and paining should be like other crafting professions and use ink, paper, colors... as materials.

What do you think?

How is an NPC supposed to understand what a good story is and what is not?

If story is interesting, story is good. Maybe different NPCs should have different tastes. One should like comedies, other should like crime stories...

And you would evaluate these artworks how? A decent grammar checker for the "writing" part alone would be a larger program than the entire game. Word count? Paste the same word in over and over.

How to evaluate the paintings? Go Google some image recognition software and see what you're asking for.




:thumbsdown:



And if determining whether story and painting are interesting makes game program 5 times the size it needs to be and cost a couple hundred dollars, idea is bad.

But, if I write gibberish(such as five pages of qofdnv9uclqjn9od) and lable it an epic poem...how's an npc to know if it's good or not? How would they actually read the book we made and figure out if they like it?

Why doesn't Bethesda just build a touring test passing AI while they make Skyrim, it wouldn't be much of a hassle ; ).

NPC should read it and decide if it is interesting. E.G. Your idea for a story (asdsmfapldkgm42305u98412o) is boring!

NO!

however, being able to write and paint notes for quests and such would be awesome. It would be cool if you had to buy the journal, and quiver/ink. But other threads have already discussed that.

TES V: The Turing Machine. (Game to follow soonish)

:D



Yes, we understand what you're saying. Now understand what I'm saying: NPCs must be programmed to do anything the developers want them to do. They are not real people the developers can simply tell "Go read this and see if it's any good." The devs would have to program (or obtain middleware) spell checkers and grammar checkers to check the stories, and those still can't evaluate "is it good/is it bad" leaving even more complex coding to do, image recognition software for the paintings, and ultimately this would take longer and require more resources than the game itself. You're talking probably a $500+ price tag, and release pushed back to around 2013.

I think he's messing with us. Anyway, I'd like to write my own book ingame, like a diary. Maybe there could even be a mechanism that allows you to sell that book to printers when you are an interesting person (leader of some guild), for a certain preset price. Would be a nice little roleplaying gimmick.

Pfft. There's a simple solution to this, guys. Srsly.

You just gotta convert the Skyrim disc into a massive soulgem and then go an a 1,000+ person trapping spree. Then our NPCs can do whatever they want!

In all fairness, I do want to see the player to be able to write, if only for the ability to write in-character journals in the world. But that would completely be 'by the player, for the player.'

I think OP made this thread as a joke.

If not.....wow.

Just. Wow.

What about Skyrim Idol, where I sing into a microphone and NPCs judge my vocal talents? That would be so awesome.

Nah. Full-on variety talent show like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gong_Show- except being in Skyrim, getting "gonged" would be...a bit more harsh than just a bell ringing and you being dragged off the stage.

This. Npc's cant have opinions, they're not that smart. They have to be programmed. In game actions can be predicted, thus allowing programmers to work that into the ncps. But in game text? There's no way to predict all the possible stories one could write. They're opinion would have to be completely and utterly random, it would have to be an insainly huge program with an equally large price tag for it to not only look at works of art and literature, but be able to deturming if the story is good or not. The intro, character development, the plot, the climix, and the conclusion...the ai would have to have human level or at least near human level brain power to be able to come up with a responce on if the book was good or not.

However, a randomly generated opinion for works of art I could let slide. I've seen a simple green square regarded as a work of art, so who on tamriel can tell what is and isnt good anymore.

Probably a joke, but if you want to write the genius AI for your art critic NPCs I'm sure Bethesda would be interested!

About writing though, I would love a simple writing system in game where you can "write" in a diary or whatever.

They would probably have to be submitted to Beth to check for copyright and appropriateness, and then be a free download. The lawyers won't have be any other way. If we are lucky, Beth could program NPC responses to specific works.

How about just writing and painting without the critics? You can sell the book but no NPC will have an opinion on it.

If you svck, you get killed. Simple!

Yes to writing as far as journals, notes and so on goes. I voted no to the rest, even though painting could be kind of nice. Set up one of those picture stand thingies and start parting, game saves whats infront of the painting as a screenshot then feeds it back into the game to become the painting. Selling them in shops or placing them in your house(s) would be fine but beyond that, meh.

^^^

NPCs would be terrible art or literature critics, you'd need extremely advanced AI to do that if AI could ever really do that. Bethesda is a great game company but I don't think they're decades or centuries ahead of the AI technology achieved by scientists dedicated to that specific field.

WRITING AND PAINTING WILL BE GOOD BUT I WON'T BE UPSET IF IT'S NOT IN IT

AND BTW, CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL!!1!!ONE!!

Er...no it isn't. :facepalm:

I would have to disagree. This isn't a small fan-based forum, this is the official Elder Scrolls forums. It just doesn't seem the place for it, and the Devs have better things to do, seeing as an NPC would not be able to fill the job.

You never know, Bethesda is pretty BA