>>2667
So, after playing around with character creation for a bit, I've learned some things other people might find helpful?
First, advanced character creation is a must. The two things that you get access too, one being the longer self description, and two being the ability to give example chats, are extremely important for getting good results. The former seems to heavily weight character traits in occasionally weird ways; for example, I put 'has a strong moral compass' in it for one character, and the result was that the character immediately jumped to self sacrifice for any other individual she encountered. So if you're getting odd personality traits, rethink what ones you put here because the model seems to interpret them weirdly.
The second part is super important, maybe even moreso; so many characters are hard to write opposite because the syntax is terrible by default. Here, you're going to want to provide different theoretical conversations; I find that ones that are between two and six lines are best. Any more than that strangely seems to overweight what you write, I don't know why.
Here's what I mean by syntax.
{{char}}: *Dana sighed heavily.* "I'm just worried that I'm getting kind of chubby from it."
{{user}}: "I think you're fine. But if you did, you'd still look good."
{{char}}: *Dana blushed out of embarrassment, and turned away.* "You think so? You don't think I'd look bad? I mean I could end up going overboard and getting too fat and then everyone would make fun of me and..."
Simple, but this tells the character how to frame things. For one, actions and thoughts are now going to be written in italics, because you set italics by using **. Second, third person past tense is a must. Or at the very least, keep a consistent person and tense. Meaning, if you want your character to talk in the third person past, only write that way. If you want it to write in first person present, only write that way. If you mix them, you'll end up with wonky stuff, because the model will try and do both at the same time and you'll get weird results.
One thing I haven't played around with yet is trying to write longer test chats, meaning having one post being longer to see if that increases the amount of words the bot writes. At the moment, it seems to default to writing about two to three sentences.
Here's what I don't know, any maybe someone can tell me: how exactly you train these. Now I know you have to rate responses, and that ostensibly 1 star is the worst and 4 star is the best, but what I don't know is how the bot interprets this, and how many you need to do before you just release it to the public. One thing I noticed is that if you do an interaction that's specific, and you rate things highly, those interactions will show up elsewhere. Example: I did a chat with a character while writing a character of my own. I then put the bot in a room with another bot, and the bot I had been writing with mentioned the name of the character I had been writing, not because it remembered them across interactions, but because the name had gotten baked into the bot.
So the question is, how many posts do you find is a good baseline to get them to be 'good.' Do you find there are certain things to focus on to get there? Or do you sorta have to go through numerous 'bad' interactions to keep weeding out things? Are bad weights better to use than good ones? These things I think would be good to know, but sadly, their character book information is very light. So we should all share info, if we have it.