《星界边境》8月1日日志任务永远的朋友

雨文冰璃

http://gl.ali213.net/html/2016-8/131697.html

《星界边境》中更新了日志——任务，永远的朋友。下面小编就为大家带来玩家“印斯茅斯:温馨”分享的《星界边境》8月1日日志任务永远的朋友，一起来看看吧!
　　标题Quest friends forever!化自Best friends forever，永远的朋友
　　这篇日志主要是介绍呵呵鱼的开发经验，对游戏相关的部分就看molly的那一段就好
　　Quest friends forever!
　　任务，永远的朋友
　　Evening, folks!
　　大家，晚上好!
　　We’re aware of a crash bug effecting OS X users since v1.0.3 and we’re working on a fix – we’ll let you know more as soon as we can! In general, at the moment we are working on another patch containing some fixes and small adjustments, and we’ve started working on our first post-1.0 content update.
　　我们已经知悉了OS X用户从1.0.3版开始的崩溃错误，而我们正在修正——一旦弄好我们会尽快让你们
　　知道!总地说，现在我们正在为另一个包含了修复和微调的补丁工作，同时我们也开始着手后1.0的第一个内容升级了。
　　It’s been a while since we had a real technical dev blog, though, so for tonight Tccoxon’s written up a post about how he built Starbound’s procedural quest system!
　　已经很久没有技术方面的开发日志了，那么，今晚Tccoxon写了个关于建立SB的随机任务生成系统的文
　　章。
　　~Mollygos
　　~玩梗狂魔·呵呵鱼社区与市场负责人molly
　　Since Starbound hit 1.0, I’ve found myself looking back over my contributions over the last couple of years. I feel incredibly lucky to have had the chance to work on Starbound, and be a part of the community. I know the rest of the team here in the office does too.
　　随着SB1.0 的发布，我发现我自己在回顾过去几年我的贡献。我越发地为能参与开发SB和成为这
　　个社区的一分子感到幸运。我知道在这个办公室里的其他成员也是这么认为的。
　　One of my favorite features in Starbound is procedural generation – the way it produces endless distinct planets to explore, the way every weapon you find is different, and every NPC has a unique appearance. I know that from a design perspective, procedural generation is often inferior to hand-designed content… but designing a procedural system that produces pleasing results is still an interesting puzzle that fascinates me. (And has been central to the concept of one of my other projects,(http://bytten-studio.com/devlog/ ... ld-overview-part-1/) Lenna’s Inception.)
　　SB里我最喜欢的特性之一就是随机生成——能够产生无数不同的星球来探索，你找到的所有武器都是不一样的，而甚至NPC们都有着不同的外貌。(译者：其实这玩意最大的缺陷是……太过随机导致没有特性而易于厌倦。反正都是差不多的……)我知道从设计的角度上看，随机生成常常是不如手动设计的内容的…但是设计一套随机系统来产生有意思的结果仍然是吸引着我的有趣的问题。(同时这也是我以前另一个工程，Lenna’s Inception的核心内容(http://bytten-studio.com/devlog/ ... ld-overview-part-1/))
　　So I jumped at the chance to build a procedural quest system for Starbound!
　　因此当有在SB开发随机任务系统的机会时，我就跳槽过来了!
　　We had three main goals for a procedural quest generation system. The first goal was encouraging the player to explore more, playing to Starbound’s strengths. Exploring in Starbound is fun. Walking across the surface of a new planet, you’ll encounter monster fights, treasure, new building and crafting materials, dungeons to clear out, friendly NPCs with something to say, and occasionally hostile NPCs to engage in combat with. So to make the best use of Starbound’s other features, the quest system should encourage you to explore the planet you’re on.
　　我们的随机任务生成系统有3个主要的目标。第一个是鼓励玩家更多地探索，去玩SB所擅长的部分。SB里的探索很有意思。漫步于一个新星球表面，你会遇到怪物而作战、宝物、新的建筑和制作材料、要去清的地下城、友好的有话想说的NPC，偶尔也会碰到敌对的NPC要和你交火。所以为了充分利用SB的其他特性，任务系统需要鼓励你们探索所在的星球。
　　Second to that, distant parts of a planet in Starbound often don’t have anything to connect them. For example, a planet can have a floran village and an avian temple on it. You might wonder about how these two groups interact and relate, but the chances are they’re distant enough that the NPCs that live in them never see each other. A good procedural quest system that involves both of these places can provide more context and story. If you rescue a floran that has been kidnapped by avian fanatics from the temple, you can read into that and determine that there is some tension between these two groups.
　　第二，SB中星球的不同部分并没有被联系起来。比如，一个星球可以同时有叶族人村庄和翼族神庙在。你可能会好奇这两群人的互动和联系，但是事实是他们离得太远，使得他们并不能见到彼此。一个优秀的随机任务系统能够把这些地方包含进来，并提供更多的内容和故事。如果你拯救了一个被神庙中的狂热翼族人绑架的叶族人，你可以深入了解并确认他们之间关系很紧张。

雨文冰璃

　　Many games have repeatable quests that quickly become dull. One of the reasons for this (in my opinion) is that the quests often have no meaningful cause or effect. If an NPC has asked me to kill the rats in her basement ten times in a row, I begin to wonder why the rats are entering her basement, why the NPC is not doing anything to keep them out, and what effect my actions are having on the local rat population. I feel dissatisfied knowing that there is no cause or effect for this quest. IMO, good quest generation systems should at least try to give their quests some semblance of meaning, so I made that the final, aspirational goal.
　　很多游戏有着重复的任务，很快就会变得枯燥。其中的原因之一(个人认为)是任务常常没有有意义的原因和结果。如果一个NPC连续10次要求我去她的地下室杀老鼠，我会开始好奇为什么老鼠总是跑进她的地下室，为什么NPC不会做些什么来阻止它们，而我做的对当地老鼠数量有什么影响。(译者：……好脑洞)我在知道这任务中并没有原因和后果后感到很不满意。在我看来(译注：IMO应该是in my opinion的简写吧)，优秀的任务生成系统需要至少试着把他们的任务赋予一些外在的含义，因此我把它作为最终的有抱负的目标。
　　Starbound isn’t the first game with a procedural quest system. Skyrim has probably the best known quest generator, Radiant. Most quests produced by Radiant consist of a randomly chosen location, enemy type and reward. The locations can be things like homes, businesses and dungeons. The type of quest you get, whether an assassination or theft, depends on who gives you the quest.
　　SB并不是第一个拥有随机任务系统的。天际(上古卷轴5，俗称老滚5)可能拥有最好的任务生成系统，Radiant.(译注：这是Bethesda开发的一套技术，首次用于上古卷轴4，改良后用于上古卷轴5，同时也用于辐射3、辐射：新维加斯以及辐射4)大部分Radiant产生的任务包括随机选择的地点、敌人类型和奖励。地点可能是像住房、公司和地下城之类的。你接到的任务可能是刺杀或者偷窃，这都取决于给予你任务的人。
　　The stated goal of Radiant was to get the player to explore locations they haven’t been to before. It achieves this, I believe, and it also happens to do reasonably well at producing meaning. I think it’s because of that that I didn’t realise I was playing procedural quests until I was half a dozen quests in.
　　Radiant声称它的目的是让玩家探索他们以前没去过的地区。我相信这一点它做到了，同时在产生意义上也做得很好。我会这么认为是因为直到我做了半打任务后才意识到这是随机生成的任务。
　　Radiant quests generally have some sort of cause — you receive theft quests from the thieves’ guild because you’re a thief — and sometimes an effect — someone you’ve stolen from can seek revenge. What I think reduces the meaningfulness of Radiant quests is that the same causes and effects are used repeatedly. There just isn’t much variety. With Starbound, we experimented with an idea to produce a wider variety of causes and effects.
　　Radiant任务大都有些起因-你从盗贼公会接到偷窃任务因为你就是个贼-有时候还有后果-你偷过的人会来寻仇。我觉得减弱了Radiant任务的意义性的问题是重复的理由和后果反复使用。(译者：你们不也是么……)并没有什么变化。在SB里，我们试验了产生变化的起因和后果的点子。
　　Earlier in development, Starbound had a series of placeholder quests to make a cup of coffee for an NPC. The sequence was something like:
　　1.Find coffee beans and use a machine them into coffee liquid
　　2.Find sand and craft it into glass to make mug
　　3.Find silver, craft it into a spoon and use it to stir the coffee in the glass
　　在早先的开发过程中，SB有个占位任务线是帮一个NPC做一杯咖啡。顺序差不多是这样的：
　　1.找到咖啡豆然后用咖啡机做成咖啡液体
　　2.找到沙子然后做成玻璃最后制成杯子
　　3.找到银，做成勺子来搅拌玻璃杯里的咖啡。
　　It’s not a great story line, but each quest in the sequence does exhibit purpose, cause and effect. That’s partly because the result of each quest is used in the next. That’s a pattern that’s easy to formalise and use in a generator:
　　1.Get A.
　　2.Use A to get B.
　　3.Use B to get C.
　　这不是一个好的故事线，但是序列中每个任务都有一定的目标、起因和后果。这有一部分是因为任务结果会用于下一个。这是个简易地标准化的生成任务的模式：
　　1.获得A
　　2.用A获得B
　　3.用B获得C
　　The quest generator in Starbound doesn’t generate just individual quests, it plans entire sequences of quests (like the above) that achieve an NPC’s goal. Surprisingly, this isn’t really anything new. At its core, the quest generator is something known as a regression planner — an algorithm that has been known about for at least 40 years. This may simply be its first use for generating quests in a commercial video game.
　　SB的任务生成并不会产生单一的任务，它计划了一个任务序列(就像上面那样)来达到某个NPC的目标。令人惊讶的是，这并不是什么新东西。从核心上说，任务生成就是回归规划-一种已经产生40多年的算法。这可能仅仅是它第一次用于商业游戏的任务生成中。

雨文冰璃

　What a regression planner does is find a sequence of actions that will take it from the way things currently are, to a world where its goal has been achieved. A futuristic household robot might use a regression planner when you ask it for a cup of coffee. It would work backwards from its goal (a cup of coffee in your hand) to determine that it needs a cup of coffee in its own appendage, and in order to get there it needs a clean cup, some fresh coffee and a spoon to stir it with. The fresh coffee would need brewing. And in order to brew the coffee it needs some bean…　　回归规划所做的是搜寻一个行动序列使事情从现在的状态前往目标已经达成的状态。一个未来家居机器人可能在当你让他做一杯咖啡时使用回归规划。它会从目标(你手里有一杯咖啡)倒推，确定它需要一杯咖啡在他的肢体上，然后为了做到这点，需要一个干净的杯子，一些新鲜的咖啡以及一个搅拌的勺子。新鲜的咖啡需要酿造(译者：呃……现煮/泡?)。然后为了做咖啡它需要一些咖啡豆……
　　In the case of the quest generator, the goal is randomly chosen from a pool. It can be anything from finding the NPC a new friend, improving the state of the village, broadening a merchant’s stock, gaining influence over another NPC, or finding a stylish new hat.
　　在任务生成的情况中。目标是在一个池中随机挑选的。它可能是很多东西，比如给NPC找个新朋友，提升村庄的生活状态，给商人补充存货，在另一个NPC那提高影响力，或者找个新的特色帽子。

　　I didn’t have the heart to tell him!
　　我甚至都不忍心告诉他!
　　(图片中任务完成文字翻译：谢谢!我看起来如何?肯定是合适而智慧，对吧。)
　　These goals are especially designed to produce permanent effects on the world, and many of them can affect the generation of later quest sequences. For example, when you’ve completed a quest to help an NPC assert dominance over another NPC, he/she can later use that influence in another quest to extort the victim for a needed item.
　　这些结果是特别为对世界产生一些永久性的影响特别设计的，而很多又能够影响到接下来的任务序列。比如，当你完成了帮助某个NPC在另一个NPC那取得霸主地位后，他/她接下来可以在另一个任务中利用这个影响力来从这个受害者那敲诈一个需要的物品。
　　By giving each goal a permanent effect, and having each quest serving the next quest, I think we’ve done a decent job of making sure Starbound’s procedural quests are meaningful. Some quests and goals work better than others, but overall I’m pleased with how it works, and I hope our players enjoy them.
　　通过给予任务结果一个永久的影响，并且让每个任务影响下一个任务，我觉得我们为让SB的随机任务更加有意义做了一些合适的工作。有些任务和结果比其他的好使，但总地说我对它的运作很满意，我也希望玩家们享受它。(译者：然而从SB被拿来和TR类比开始就注定会有大批被误导的玩家进场。他们可不见得欣赏这个，和无人深空(暴死深空，误)类比才是正确的。)
　　One of the things I learned while building this system is that, depending on the context, even bad or stupid procedural generation can be positive. The first sequence I remember Starbound generating was one where an NPC wanted to make friends with his neighbour… so he asked me to steal his neighbour’s torch off the wall, and then give back to the neighbour as a gift from him. The neighbour was so delighted to have a torch again, they became instant friends!
　　在构建这个系统的过程中，我学到了些东西，依靠着前后关系，就算是糟糕的或愚蠢的随机生成也能变得有意思。我记得SB生成的第一个序列是某个NPC想要和邻居交朋友…所以他让我去把邻居墙上的火把偷走，然后他再把火把作为礼物送给邻居。邻居重新有了火把，感到很高兴，他们很快成为了朋友!(译者：无力吐槽)
　　The reason this is funny instead of jarring is that the NPCs in Starbound always look dumb, thanks to their cartoony emotes and exaggerated behaviours. So if you know you’re going to be using procedural generation in a project, you can design the context around it to turn its mistakes into (in the legendary words of Bob Ross) happy accidents.
　　这很有意思而不是不和谐是因为SB里的NPC总像个哑巴一样，这都是拜他们的卡通表情和夸大的表现所赐。因此如果你知道你在项目中使用随机生成，你可以围绕着它设计上下文来把它从错误变成(用鲍伯·鲁斯(译注：罗伯特·诺曼·鲁斯(Robert Norman Ross)，艺名鲍伯·鲁斯(Bob Ross)，是位美国画家、艺术指导与电视节目主持人。)的名句来说)快乐的意外。
　　Starbound was pretty much the perfect environment in which to experiment with procedural quest generation, thanks to its cartoony NPCs and wide variety of mechanics and activities.
　　SB几乎是试验随机任务生成的完美环境，感谢这些卡通NPC们和多变的机械与活动(译注：没明白……)

　　I’ve also learned how to make a better quest generation system.
　　同样的我也学到了如何让任务生成系统变得更好。
　　Starbound generates multiplayer quests. Multiple players can accept a quest, and what happens — whether they can all complete it together or whether they must compete for the reward — depends on which quest it is. I think this was a mistake because it complicates the system and prevents the generator from reasoning about the player’s progress. Quests individually tailored to each player would be much better. The generator would know what the player’s been doing on other planets, it could involve their other colonies, and tailor the difficulty of enemies more precisely. Right now, it can’t make any such assumptions about the player.
　　SB产生多人任务。多个玩家可以接受一个任务，而发生的事情-不管他们是都能一起完成还是要为了奖励竞争-取决于是哪个任务。我觉得这是个错误，因为这让系统变得复杂，并阻止了玩家进程的合理性。为每个玩家单独定制的任务会更好。生成器会知道玩家在星球上做了什么，它可能牵扯到他们的其他的殖民地，并更精确地给予不同难度的敌人。当前，它还做不出这些关于玩家的假设。
　　Quests with branching paths and multiple actors would allow the player more freedom to complete quests the way they want. Right now, quest sequences have only one ending, but theoretically multiple endings could be generated with a more advanced iterative planning algorithm. If you receive a quest to steal an NPC’s item, an alternative quest could be provided that allows you to report that NPC to a guard instead. Branching quests probably wouldn’t fit Starbound very well, but would be interesting to see in other games!
　　拥有分支的任务和多个演员(译注：大概指涉及到的人吧)能让玩家更自由地按他们的想法完成任务。当前，任务序列只有一个结局，但是理论上多结局可以通过更高级的迭代规划算法生成。如果你收到了窃取某个NPC物品的任务，另一个可选任务会出现，让你向卫兵去报告。多分支任务可能不怎么适合SB，但是在别的游戏里应该会很有意思!