Oh? New engine. That sounds like a major improvement but as i haven't played around with your modding system because it looks to be a hassle. Please explain what your current NPC programming setup is because i would like to know..

As an AI nerd, This comment gives me wood

If you can turn a tree into a circular plain i will be very impressed and very happy.

@Nautica

The new AI will be able to allow the NPC's to make their own plans based on desires and personality.

Definitely going to be very cool if it works.

I would suggest something along the lines of fuzzy logic brains. You could shift the logic zones for each type of input as the NPC learns. Then the various inputs could be adjusted as the logic gets adjusted over time. After studying neural nets and fuzzy logic, I always felt like fuzzy logic had a lot of promise for programmable pattern matching. Better than the black box neural nets. Since with neural nets you never know if you training on noise or data. Fuzzy logic definitely gets rid of the tons of logic required to simulate thinking. It reduces the logic down to a finite amount per character.

I disagree with that because neural nets need to be trained and this game is a perfect choice because you would only need to record players commands and actions to train the nets and a dungeon is a perfect place for training that and the story modes.

Hmm sounds like what was suggested

nice

This is a very clever idea and could lead to all kinds of fun!

I also think that was a great idea of mine

Most often its the simple things which add replay value to a title. ^^

This combined with some sort of char training will make the game self expanding, the more you play the more sophisticated the interactions will get.

And please don't forget to make the NPCs a lot more vocal in the "free play" (= no story) mode. As it is, they behave like automatons, giving nearly no feedback to the player about what's happening to them.