# Personality Overlays for Robots/Hacked Robots

**URL:** <https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/personality-overlays-for-robots-hacked-robots/18532>\
**Category:** The Drawing Board\
**Created:** [January 24, 2019, 1:58pm UTC](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/personality-overlays-for-robots-hacked-robots/18532 "2019-01-24T13:58:08Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![nameless\_survivor](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.cataclysmdda.org/nameless_survivor/32/4476_2.png) [@nameless\_survivor](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/u/nameless_survivor)\
**Post date:** [January 24, 2019, 1:58pm UTC](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/personality-overlays-for-robots-hacked-robots/18532/1 "2019-01-24T13:58:08Z")

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So I made a thread recently about adding more functions to the control laptop. One of the things I had an idea about later after someone mentioned adding the ability to give robots and turrets names, was giving them a _personality,_ and the ability to change it.

> [@Hacked Turret Ammo/Health Check Option For Control Laptop](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/hacked-turret-ammo-health-check-option-for-control-laptop/18510/3):
>
> That would definitely be an improvement. Slight derail, but semi-related to topic: I’ve been playing a lot of Fallout recently, and in that game you could hack consoles to activate Protectron robots, and choose which type of personality they had (firefighter, medic, police, etc). It would be nice for hacked robots to eventually have VERY basic personality software. I’m not talking true AI or emotions, I’m thinking it would be mostly cosmetic, something that was developed to help them interact …

I’ve never heard any robot speak in game (other than the malfunctioning cyborg), and having each type of robot have its own distinct phrase list or personality would be interesting. To be clear, I’m not talking about artificial intelligence or synthetic emotions; it would only be the SEMBLANCE of emotions and personality, designed to help robots better interact with humans.

But what would implementing this involve? I suspect it could be done in JSON, and would be similar to how the Mi-Go randomly parrot words. I think this is a function or tag in JSON which does this, but I’m not sure where the phrase list is, or how to duplicate this function. If this is the case, I think it might be easiest to simply write a similar function for each robot type, drawing from its own unique phrase list.

Some examples for default robot personality templates:  
Police/Security Robot: [https://youtu.be/t1\_Pw563opc?t=37](https://youtu.be/t1_Pw563opc?t=37)  
Military Robot: [https://youtu.be/4iRJS6BT0ZM?t=429](https://youtu.be/4iRJS6BT0ZM?t=429)  
Chicken Walker: [https://youtu.be/Hzlt7IbTp6M?t=115](https://youtu.be/Hzlt7IbTp6M?t=115)

In addition to having the option of letting a robot use its default personality, you might also be able to reprogram them with a control laptop to use a different model’s personality overlay, or even have an in-game option to create custom ones the robot would use for different scenarios. I’m not sure how this would be implemented, but I suspect it would not simply use JSON (though the input quotes might be stored in JSON).

[![](https://img.youtube.com/vi/BJHzyg9AOsY/maxresdefault.jpg "Short Circuit (6/8) Movie CLIP - Your Mama Was a Snowblower (1986) HD") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJHzyg9AOsY)