sophisticatedZombie

It sure would be nice to have some real pathing solutions.

I'd like to add a few related to some of the AI things I've been adding: Commenting to someone else that they've seen some evidence of intruders but not intruders themselves "Be on the lookout, I've seen some strange things around" Stating that they've seen a discharged weapon, like an arrow "A weapon! Where did that come from!" Maybe some more generic things would do but right now the closest I have for the later is "Hey, that's not right" which doesn't quite cut it.

Just as a note, here is a link to a website trying to create a bank of common creative license sound effects. We may qualify for usage of some of the sounds. Also, the creators are attributed so we could track them down. Also, the forums have tons of discussions on the issues we are talking about here, with input from copyright attorneys etc... http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/

Having worked for companies that have seen patent and trademark lawsuits, this is not a small deal. If anyone with a lawyer thinks they can convince a jury in the US that their copyright was infringed, they will bring a suit to garnish wages from whomever of us have jobs. There are district courts in Texas that are very amenable to such cases, and they will be filed there. Note that all they have to do is convince a jury that their revenues may have been diminished... not that the party breaking copyright actually made any revenue. Also keep in mind that if any materials or planning related to copyright infringement were hosted on a service, such as these forums, they could go after them as well, so long as the country they are in has a copyright treaty with the US, which most countries do. Basically they will go after whomever has the deepest pockets. Please be careful about this as I don't want to have to drop off of the project for legal reasons. Yes, usually this just begins as a cease and desist letter, but you never know where it will go from there. What I would reccommend doing is using the collections of sounds as a basis for getting ideas on what types of things can be recorded. Sometimes you can listen to a sound effect and say.. ah, they are hitting a slinky with a ruler! (not that the sound is good if you do that). Also, as many of the people here do, I've got considerable experience with making sounds using combinations of synthesizers, trackers, filters, and effects in Buzz. If there are particular sounds we want, I may be able to make some using some simple samples and a bunch of effects.

I've been very impressed with some of the beta-ish maps I've been using to test AI routines. The first time I heard the whole sound scheme (entrance sound, ambient background) come together on a well designed and textured map my jaw dropped. And to echo what others have said, inside the mod we have been very busy.

Hi, My name is SophisticatedZombie, and I'm a Potion Hoarder. By the time I get out of the cave/dungeon/necropolis/castle/fast food restaurant/cyborg headquarters, I'm always carrying at least 200 health potions. I know its ridiculous, but I can't stop myself! I've tried to start drinking my potions, but I just can't get the liquid past my lips. Anyway.. the other day I was in a cave looking for a missing gold ring with an insignia on it, and my legs completely buckled out from under me. My pack was so heavy I just couldn't carry it any more. As I lay there in the dark, dying of thirst, I realized I had hit rock bottom. I know that every day I'm going to have to make an effor to use my potions, and its not going to be easy, but this is the first day of the rest of my life.

Living below the poverty line in America is a LOT different than living in North Korea. At least, that's what refugees have told me. Here, there are people like myself who give money and offer a hand to help. There, there is often no food for anyone who is not in the millitary or government.

The threat of North Korean nukes has nothing to do with missiles. It has more to do with shipping. Container shipping is largely untracked and it would be easy to deliver a nuke in a shipping container, or a truck, or an airplane. It also has alot to do with proliferation. North Korea tends to get involved a great deal with any enterprise that might bring in money to support its unsustainably sized army. Personally I don't think there is alot anyone can do about North Korea other than slowly win the trust of the Chinese. Once China no longer feels the need for a buffer state between itself and South Korea, North Korea will become part of China. While not a wonderful outcome, it would be better than the current situation for the people of North Korea. On the subject of Iraq, as to why people tend to want to fight the US army, I agree with some of the other comments written. Ultimately, it would be in the Iraqis peoples best interest to let the infrastructure be rebuilt, but there are too many hurt feelings all around for people to behaive rationally. However, it is also important not to overlook that much of the activity is sponsored by various other regional powers with deep pockets. There are elements within Iraq that want a strict Shia state, and they see this as a golden opportunity. In their minds, once the US leaves, they will easily be able to topple any multi-party government and set up a cleric run state like in Iran. Also, on the Sunni side you have the Bath party of Syria, which, surrounded by Lebanon on one side which it recently lost control of, and Iraq on the other, desperately doesn't want to wind up surrounded by Shia governments. So, Syria funds the Sunni insurgency. Iraq is currently more about a war between Syria (with funding by Saudi Arabia) vs Iran. Why US policymakers thought they could avoid such an outcome is beyond me. Well, actually not entirely beyond me. It has turned out that many of the "Iraqi dissidents" that were lobbying in Washington for the past 15 years, and the ones who convinced the neocons that they would be greeted as liberators, were really Iranian intelligence agents. Basically we got suckered into creating the nation of West Iran. Its amazing how stupid greedy oil executives can be when someone tells them what they want to hear. Anyway, so the question now is what to do. We can pull out, or we can stay. Which is best for the Iraqi people and which is best for our own soldiers in harms way. Obviously coming home is best for our own people, but is it best for the people of Iraq? I'm still unsure on that angle. Anyone who has so far stood up and tried to create a consensus state with freedom of religion would probably be executed by Al Saudr and the Iranians on one side or Syria on the other.. We would basically be sentencing many brave Iraqis to death. Then again, if we stay, other civilians will die due to the insurgent actions our presence provokes. So which people get to live and which die? No clear decision as far as I can see.

The memorizing spells beforehand is leftover from the pen and paper experience. Its part of the D&D game that I don't think the CRPG adaptations have ever handled well and that I miss: expedition management. In a good D&D campaign, a dungeon expedition is a thought out event. You have to think about what you might need ahead of time, what you can carry, and what to leave behind. In most CRPG adaptations, its mostly about cramming your pack full of everything you want the most, and if you don't have something you need you just reload. Its a shame personally. If done right, expedition management increases the feeling of exploration. I'd like to see more of that "exploration simulation" in future crpg games.

One of the criminal cases involving US forces in Iraq involves a guy that is basically a classic sociopath. His fellow soldiers complained about him and he got discharged, but not before he managed to murder civilians. You would think that with the billions spent on ridiculous projects in defense, some basic psychological screening could be set up. I guess it shows where the priorities are. Ambassadors of democracy.

There is an interesting experiment in planning that involves quantum coupled photons and a very long coil of fiberoptic wire down which half oft he pair travels. The experiment is meant to into the possibility of reverse causality. (You can read the result of the quantum calculation before you actually do the calculation, theoretically). If such a setup works, we will have far more computing capability than we will need to build a holodeck. Actually, we'll be able to build something akin to Kragnerac's Tools from the Egg of Time (Morrowind). Ofcourse, it probably won't work. There is a lot about quantum coupling we don't understand.

Another thing to keep in mind is that its never about honour to the mugger. They arrange things so that you don't stand a chance, and to them, its just business. If you fought a mugger over honour and later told him thats why you fought him, he'd probably just think you were crazy. He, as a mugger, knows he can't steal your honour by jacking you in the street more than anyone else. Hell, if he left a way open for you to maintain your honor he wouldn't be good at what he does. Your anger is understandable, but your attacker, when he is in mugger mode, is a memetic disease, not a human being that responds to social interactions. Don't take it personally. Still, martial arts training can improve your chances if you ever run into a totally irrational killer. And, a good trainer will help you deal with the anger so that you don't get into a fight you don't have to. Alot of victims of crime wind up getting involved in a violent incident within 6 months of the attack, and its never a good thing.

If the searching problem isn't solved yet, could it be because the monsters aren't inheriting the humanoid script routines?

Ishtvan, When working on the player leaning, I noticed that rotating the bounding boxes is possible but can be rather complicated. It requires you to write in some code that detects movements that would have rotated the box through a collision in-between animationf frames.

Yeah, there are a number of variables that will need to be tuned. I've checked in the stuff, so you can look at it. Feel free to make any changes to the head turning functions in the ai_darkmod_base.script file to get them the wayyou like them.

If its not too late, I could go through the scripts this weekend and add some random head turns etc... The key would be adding a lookAt (position, duration) event method. Right now there are lookAtEnemy and lookAt (entity, duration) methods, but nothing to look at just a piece of space. It could be done relatively quickly however. I've added two new script methods: lookAtPosition and lookAtAngles. I've placed them in the darkmod_ai_base script along with some probability variables. There is chance to look around while idle (during patrol, waiting, etc..) and a chance to look around while searching. THey are each a "probability per second". If an AI is slightly agitated (non-0) then its chance of looking around while idle is doubled. Eventually we will want to make the probability variables set from spawAargs. For now they are set in the Init member from defines at the top of the script. An overriding script could always just replace the variable values with new ones for a different type of AI (elite etc...) I'll make sure I have all the latest updates from CVS and then check this stuff in tonight.

I think it is the shear enormity of the transformations required to do anything with FPS AI that frustrates people away. At the moment, I'm having fun, but there was alot of grunt work for a while.

Hi, I'm currently working on the AI searching and inter-AI communication routines. I was previously working with the file "darkmod_ai_humanoid.def" to add definitions of sounds for the AI searching and communication routines. Have these definitions been moved elsewhere? I looked around but didn't see any mention of a change. I'd appreciate it if somebody could fill me in on where to look.

Here's a few sound requests based on some of the AI communications work I'm doing: A vocal sound where a guard requests help in searching for something: eg "Hey, come look over here!" A vocal sound where a guard is too busy fighting to respond to a request: eg "I've got my hands full!"

I went transdimensional for a while. I focussed my 40khz nanotubes on the 5th pentagon side too long and got taken to the galactic node. Anyway, I'm back... but could certainly use some help. If you want to write AI code talk to sparhawk and see what he thinks of the idea.

Quoth the Upright Citizens Brigade "Everyone here needs to coooooooooooooooooooooool out." Reasonable people can and will disagree. In particular, we spend alot of time arguing about things that really come down to opinion, and alot of people on these forums don't know how to write with tact. I don't know if they do it out of ignorance, or because it amuses them, but there is no reason to take it personally whatever the cause. Ultimately there are an infinite number of games we could make and everyone here, if given their druthers would likely make a different one.

I, for one, will take as many 'wow, we got like mentioned in a *real* magazine and stuff!!!!'s as I can get.

As for the day night cycle stuff. Yeah, that was done in Ultima 4 eons ago. AI and world simulation took a big hit during the whole 3d craze of the past 15 years.

I have to discent with general opintion on this one. I loved Morrowind. I liked digging into the story and having to track down different people's opinions to try to get some sort of ideas as to what was really going on. I guess I could see how it would be possible to get lost, since no one person could really give you a definitive answer. You had to talk to various characters and read between the lines to figure out what "really" happened. Even then there are some uncertainties. I'm going to say this, and probably take alot of flack for it, but if you play the main game the whole way through and talk to enough people, you'll find that Morrowind has one of the best plots of any game in recent memory. It has more to say about our modern world and the nature of "history" than any college course. The term "Apographia" doesn't even begin to cut it. As for the missions, some of them were a bit boring, but I guess i enjoyed a great number of them. I enjoyed the fact that I could go off and ignore the main plot for a while and just work on climbing the ranks in some petty factoin if I wanted to. Even if you didn't like the game though, you have to admit that Bethesda are the masters of mixing computer generated fractal worlds and overlayed content. They always are struggling to find the balance. In Daggerfall there was alot of fractal (in the Elder Scrolls Pantheon "Anu") and in Morrowind there was more overlayed human written content (in the Elder Scrolls Pantheon "Padomay"). I was tickled when I figured out that the residents of Tamriel had a cosmology and mythology that touched in places on what there world really was.... Particularly when I red the Redguard description of the "infinite snake that curls around itself, eating itself" and the world as "its skin". Pretty cool tribal description of a fractal procedurally generated universe. Anyway, enough fanboyism for the moment.

Well, to bring it back on topic..... I'm going to prepare to take a few rounds in the "War on Violence" and say that I actually liked some parts of GTA: Vice City. There was just something about driving aruond a city at a breakneck pace, running fromt the police while listening to Kate Bush that I couldn't get tired of. Note, that I particularly liked the driving around, doing stunts etc... There were parts of the game, like the freeform assasination missions, that I just skipped because I found them too objectionable. Still, the driving gameplay was fun for me. I spent alot of time doing the ambulence and pizza delivery mini-games. I was surprised at that, since I don't generally go for much in the arcade-action category, but I enjoyed the "emergent gameplay." Now, keep in mind that in real life, I'm a peaceful person who does positive volounteer work in the community and doesn't own a gun. (Ofcourse, as a side note, in some parts of the USA that makes me irresponsible for not being able to defend my neighbors against the government) I generally prefer more intellectual content in my games, but I do put up with a certain amount of "crap" because I figure it is the only way the makers can earn a living. For example, I enjoyed the Fallout series of RPG titles immensely. The first one had a very nice tragic arc. However, to play them you had to put up with alot of gratuitous violence (which was kind of part of the plot, sort of). I remember when I read the advertising copy about "turn your opponents into blood sausages" I almost didn't buy the game.