Hello everyone, I am Carlos from Spain.
I am a 30 year old IT Technical Engineer and have been working on my dream project for the last year in my spare time. After 9 years as a hobbyist game programmer I felt ready to take on the challenge of pursuing my dream career inspired by my partner and the on-going boom in indie development.

The last module I have been working on was the questing system, and it is something that just didn’t feel right. The whole concept of the game relies heavily on randomization, scrapping the traditional linear storyline/progression, making sure every playthrough feels new and different. In such a dynamic and changing world the traditional NPC interaction model felt too stiff and out of place with rest of the concept.

A couple of weeks ago it finally came to me and I threw out the whole questing system and started to design a system more like a chat, parsing strings searching for keywords and wildcards, building a database of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and keywords that would produce a more interactive experience (I bet that sounds very familiar to everyone here). Essentially it was a very primitive version of what you all know here as chatterbots or natural language processing.

A few days ago I was completely stuck. I realized the way I searched the strings and my database were flawed and produced unwanted results. So I started to search the web to see if there was any similar attempt I could use as reference and learn from. Needless to say I was incredibly surprised that not only had someone “attempted” this idea, but there was a whole discipline dedicated to it called “Natural Language Processing”. So for the past 3 days I have been fascinated reading everything I found about NLP, chatterbots, the Turing Test, etc…
3 of the bot engines I found were especially interesting to me (though I won’t mention them here for respect), and I finally settled for ChatScript because it was the most similar to the core concept I had in mind (but of course lightyears ahead of what I was doing), the syntax is much more apealing/natural/logical to me, and more suited for my specific needs.

I am fairly new to all this and don’t have much experience in the subject other than half a month programing my own failed attempt at a chatbot engine, a few days learning everything I could online about the history of NLP and current chatbots, and reading the chatscript tutorial, basic user manual, and external communications manual.

I am glad to meet all of you, to be part of the community and eager to learn all I can about this fascinating technology. And happy to see some familiar faces, among them Dave Morton, I have learned alot thanks to you. Some of the material I have been reading these days was yours, including a blog and even a video conference! Glad to see you are a moderator of the engine I finally chose!

Hi, Carlos, and welcome to chatbots.org.

I’m really intrigued by the project that you’ve chosen to take on. Being not only a chatbot (well, chatbot engine, really) developer, and an avid gamer, I’m always interested in anything that melds the two in some way.

By the way, you’ve got my curiosity up regarding the other 2 chatbot platforms you’ve looked at, but didn’t choose. You needn’t worry about any “respect issues” in this case, really. In fact, to my way of thinking (and probably many others here, as well), it’s more a sign of respect to give them a mention. chatbots.org isn’t about only one chatbot platform; we care about all of them (Ok, maybe not AI_Mind, so much {Sorry Arthur}, but most, if not all, of the rest). Personally, I’m involved with two different chatbot platforms (though with ChatScript, all I really am is the “web guy”), and am a big fan of a few others, as well.

Ah, the infamous Presentation on Program O… {Oh, LORD! He saw the YouTube video! ACK!!! } While I like to think I gave out a lot of good info during that talk, I think I must have been channeling the spirit of a racoon, giving how much I fidgeted with my hands the whole time. I found it a bit distracting, myself.

Ok, done rambling. Off to bed (it’s 1AM here). Have fun here, and please feel free to keep us in the loop with regard to your project. And of course, don’t hesitate to ask any questions that you might have about anything related to AI, chatbots, or our favorite pasta recipes. We’’ answer what we can.

The three chatbot platforms I was most interested in were RiveScript AIML and ChatScript, but ChatScript won me over in the end. I also saw another but I didn’t look into it much as it seemed to use a similar approach as CleverBot, and that is not really the direction I want to go…
I am having some trouble embedding ChatScript for testing, if anyone could help me out take a look at my post this other thread:
http://www.chatbots.org/ai_zone/viewthread/1552/

With all technical issues with ChatScript, Bruce is the man to ask. I do well to be able to answer the simplest of newbie-type questions.

I see that he’s already responded to your initial post, so I think you’re in good hands. That said, however, you may want to do a Google search for C++ to C conversion. It may help to point out other areas that could need some attention.