Ok, have now given Chaos's RTC AI-NPC a playthrough, and as requested list below a mini 'review'.
This is extremely impressive work. I have no idea how it works at the technical level, so I will describe it purely from the experiential point of view of the player. Playing it immediately throws up many ideas and 'what ifs', which I'm sure CS has waiting in the wings to implement. I'll touch on those at the end.
The dungeon is essentially a test bed for adding new NPC mechanics, with a basic storyline implemented to hang the new game mechanics around and demonstrate how the mechanics work, and also incorporates a complex AI system.
Each player character has a series of unique skills that can be employed and used, which are accessed via the weapons slots when the character is empty handed. Skills can be things like lock picking, casting spells, scaring off enemies, or 'brokering peace' with an NPC/monster.
The skills exist on a series of 'pages' in the weapons slot, so there can be more than just 3 skills available to each character. These skills also include options for things like reading a back-story and for party management - for example, removing a character from a party.
The main AI-NPC mechanic, however, is through the interaction with the 'external' monsters. Click on a monster and a similar menu appears in the weapons slot, with options for recruiting, commanding, or talking to that NPC and multiple NPCs.
So, for example, one can control a Guard, or multiple Guards, with commands like Stay, Attack, Move, Call to player position, etc. In another example, an undead player character can sacrifice character levels to raise an undead army of skeletons, who again in turn, can then be commanded either individually or en masse.
This is an extremely interesting development. The player now has control over external agents within the dungeon. Both puzzles and combat therefore have a potentially massive benefit from this extra interaction. Summon a group of guards to assist in a fight, deploy them at strategic locations or tiles to help solve puzzles or to protect an area, make them collect items, etc. A new area may only be reachable, for example, if a certain external NPC-type is commanded in certain ways.
Combat can therefore take on a much more complex dimension and scale. No longer is it a matter of the player combatting with the immediately adjacent tile; now it entails commanding multiple external parties to do your bidding, combatting multiple enemies within any given area, at distance. Employ spirit specialist NPCs, for example, to take care of ethereal enemies, employ brute force 'tanks' to engage in hand to hand combat.
As part of the test-bed, the player can recruit to the party almost any monster type. So one can meet a Dragon, recruit him, and from then on one of your party is a dragon, complete with the option (I presume, not currently implemented) to have Dragon-specific abilities through the new 'skills' menus.
There are many neat touches and details implemented. Lock picking can take a while, with amusing text based comments and remarks from the characters appearing. Clever use of existing spells have been incorporated in novel ways (or at least novel to me) to create interesting puzzles. Some new items are clever in that they are interactive - a monster description scroll, for example. NPCs have amusing quips and comments at various stages and events. One can resurrect bones at special alcoves, turning them into controllable minions.
So, any criticisms? The limitations of the base DM/RTC engine become apparent in certain situations. For example, there are no 'fight' animations for external NPCs from 'side' or 'rear' views. So whilst you can hear fight noises, you only see the fight animation on the front graphic. But you know what's happening. Again, this is purely to do with the base engine, not a 'fault' of the work CS has produced.
Sometimes a situation can get quite crowded, to the extent that you can't get to the position you want to - an ongoing fight may block your path - something that might require further attention from CS. Very rarely, the NPC you want to control moves before you can get to the command you want to.I only got stuck once - I knew what to do, but couldn't make it work - but it was a minor one-time only and once explained it was plain sailing.
In general, the new mechanics are intuitive and easy to understand. They could benefit from a little more graphic explanation or graphic assistance - ie, 'where to click' markers or something. I didn't experience any crashes during the 1.5 playthoughs I have done to date. I think I saw everything on offer, but will definitely give it another run through.
In summary, the extra breadth, dimensionality, and sheer number of possibilities this potentially opens up is deeply impressive. As I said at the top of this review, I have no idea technically how CS achieves all this (I now have visions of CS as some mad genius huddled away somewhere in a lair picking apart the fundamentals of RTC), but it gives me many ideas for how these mechanics can be incorporated in custom dungeon projects, and storylines involving external parties at a fundamental level (one could imagine situations where all the king's men are hostile to the party, until such time as a deed is done, and the men become allies, for example).
so, first suggestion/challenge, Chaos: do an evil 'mirror' party of the existing party, a little like the Dark Link character in Ocarina of Time...!
Amazing