demagogue

So you can't have D3 AI in DarkMod at all? Not that I'm dying to have mindless demons in DM or whatever, but I was under the impression that it was like a oneway street, all D3 assets could basically be thrown into DM but not vice versa. But I gather it's a lot more nuanced than that.

Yes, I was just thinking how it's just like a dev to be dying to play his own game: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showt...ost&p=85370

There's a video of a demo play from X06 released. I already linked to it in the Bioshock thread, but because it also has Assassin's Creed I thought I'd crosslink just to keep things tidy: ms.groovygecko.net/groovyg/clients/xbox/xbox_hb.wmv?wmcache=0 The AC part starts a little before the 32 minute mark. It should probably also be added that it looks pretty f'ing fun.

They've released another trailer for Bioshock and it's looking very good: ms.groovygecko.net/groovyg/clients/xbox/xbox_hb.wmv?wmcache=0 It's about 37 minutes in (right after the also very good looking Assassin's Creed demo, which is entirely in-game). for the ttlg thread on this: http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?...447#post1506447 The Bioshock movie is prerendered, so you know; I'm not sure how much of it will make it in-game. But it's awesome nonetheless.

Not for the PC, it wouldn't. There are so many variables of trouble to try to pick it up mid-fight -- all the problems of self-dropping a sword multiplied by 10. And it would effectively render bad-guy AI into (temporary?) civilians, which could raise all sorts of hairy problems. One major set of problems would be trying to script or foresee every possible place a weapon could fall to ... like if you're on a bridge and it falls into the water. Now the PC loses his sword for the entire game without consent, and the AI would be thrown into M.O.-limbo. I could think of *other* types of games where it might fit, like a fencing simulator or something, but not this one IMO.

I got the impression it was something in between. It's not the absolute latest build because, e.g., Ken's already said the HUD's been somewhat tweaked from what we see here. But I think the article can be at least right in saying that it's not *exactly* the E3 build, either. It's a later build that was rigged up (and deemed good enough) probably specifically for public release. But they've done work since then, which probably improves things but maybe isn't as "clean" to release publicly.

Awesome timing, Komag. You (inadvertently) gave me the best present for my birthday! Thanks.

@Spar, If you noticed, there is a big difference between the time put into a full FM and a contest mission. A contest mission can be churned out in 2-4 weeks. A full FM, if you're working at it diligently, I mean look at the production times for the three Calendra's Legacy FMs, each one took about 3 months, and from what I gathered it was on a pretty diligent schedule. That's probably the fastest ... so any time longer than that is I think due to taking lots of breaks on building and really filling things out. By the way, you guys should consider running a contest for TDM assets if you really want people to contribute. The funny thing is that, given how much better output we seem to get from the community from contests, this is only half-joking.

You think NW was being a little harsh with the baton? I mean, are we just not supposed to talk about Komag there in any but a shallow sense? And if not in that thread (understandable), then where are we allowed to talk about it? Anyway, I don't worry about it ... rules is rules, and I don't really want to dredge anything up here. It does make me wonder how well she'll keep things under taps during the contest, though. I mean the entire FM forum is going to be flooded with Komag contest threads! (Can't exactly not let people put up threads on them.) I can predict shock and surprise every third post and she'll have to put up a sticky: "First rule of Komag contest; nobody talks about Komag." Oy, what a week it will be. Anyway, I'm not sure exactly what you want to do with this poll ... since of course the future of K's contests are up to him, and most people's opinion there I think are going to be pretty predictable. My guess is he'll -- or probably better worded, if it were me -- I'd switch over to TDM when it's ready, but that's still such a ways off it's hard to think about it now. And until then I'd maybe play with the idea of thematic contests in the meantime. Aside from his actual opinion, a poll is just going to be a somewhat gratuitous if maybe nice chance to know what TTLGers think along the way. But I guess it doesn't hurt.

To save you the trouble of looking for it, the link to the full text of Abelard's memoir is here: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/abelard-histcal.html Aside from being helpful, I just enjoy the surreal aspect of linking to a 12-century tract as a way to "contribute" to a thread on the evolution of the eye. Gotta love these forums.

A lot I could say, but for now, I'll take care of these: Ok, here are two good introductory papers to get you going: http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty.../papers/ecs.pdf http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/ Some standard (recent) books are: Dennett's Consciousness Explained (defending a kind of functionalism) Chalmer's The Conscious Mind (defending property dualism) A more popular book which is incredibly fun and accessible to read is: Dennett & Hofstadter: The Mind's Eye (dealing with the "spiritual" implications of physicalism/ functionalism) For more of the older classics, a list here (look at the comments below as well for others): http://fragments.consc.net/djc/2005/01/books_in_the_ph.html A very extensive on-line collection of phil of mind papers on just about every topic there is, is here. (This is Chalmers' database. It seriously has *everything* you'd want to read about.) As a few classic papers (which should all be on that page), - Nagel's What's it like to be a bat - Jackson's Knowledge Argument (and replies) - Block Problems with Functionalism - Searle's Minds, Brains, Programs (Chinese Room Argument against strong AI) For now, I personally like Peter Carruthers's approach (although a few things I disagree), which is very much connected to cognitive science and emperical approaches to the brain and evolution, etc (and you can see his papers on Chalmer's page). I think functionalism is basically the way to go. No shit ... that's a crazy coincidence because just last night for kicks and giggles I read Abelard's Memoirs on Calamities , which among other things recounts the love story between Abelard and Heloise -- for no good reason except I had no good idea who the hell Abelard was. He's a terrifically engaging writer, wasn't he? What amazes me was that he was writing in like 1100. I always had this impression that the *entire* 1000 years of the Dark Ages were just that, dark, but reading Abelard he really brings that period in France alive ... and you feel the spark and energy of intellectual creativity and new thinking spreading around. I loved it how the religious authorities couldn't really touch him because he put so much work in making his arguments logically airtight (for the time); he knew his arguments were better than everyone else's - he was so delightfully self-sure - and his students all loved him. I loved reading it!

I guess it's time for more philosophy-types to swoop in. OrbWeaver - On consciousness (cns), from the way I studied it in phil of mind, your reply to Max. is missing something if you don't distinguish (1) and (2) below. I don't know if you actually did or didn't, but at least your post can be read as confusing on this point. So anyway, we're all supposed to distinguish: (1) THE SUPERVENIENCE THESIS. Cns supervenes on NCCs (NCC=Neural Correlate of Consciousness, the minimal unique neural activity that gives rise to a specific cns experience). This just means that cns experience is entirely dependent on the physical substrate manifesting it, so an experience cannot exist unless there is an NCC there to physical support it. There is an emerical necessary, one-way connection from physical -> cns. In the lingo they say the experience "supervenes" on the NCC, as if it were conceptually hovering over it every time it comes into existence. FROM (2) THE ENTAILMENT THESIS. *This* NCC activity logically entail *this* experience. All it means for there to be an experience is that there is this NCC activity. While most people (not otherwise predisposed against science) I think are on board with (1), (2) is actually a much harder case to sell. There are two big challenges: (A) THE KNOWLEDGE ARGUMENT: If you know everything about an NCC, you don't necessarly know everything about the cns experience. Imagine a great neuroscientist living her whole life in a black and white room. When she "understands" how the *blue* part of the color vision works in her brain, she still has no idea what "blueness" is like because she hasn't experienced it (a bad argument because it conflates "knowledge of" and "knowledge that", but the intuition is harder to shake off that this info doesn't entail these properties of experience, first person, no gaps, holistic) (B ) THE CONCEIVABILITY ARGUMENT. You can imagine, or at least there is no logical inconsistency in imagining having the *same* NCC activity giving rise to *different* experience (red<->green), or even no experience; zombies. And what about silicon brains functionally equivalent to human brains; the behavior would be the same, but is the experience? You can imagine it as different. What if the nation of China manifests the same functional relationships as a small NCC (which ostensibly are smaller than 1 billion synapses) by 1 billion people waving red flags to one another (so the pattern of flag signalling is identical to neuron signaling by CL- charges firing adjacent neurons). Such signalling might run an FPS if correctly timed (very slowly!), but is it cns? If so, where? We can at least imagine it isn't. Both of these argue that there is no *logical* necessary connection. There is only an emperical connection that logically could have been otherwise. It gives a foothold for some non-physical hangers-on in the universe, such as property dualism; the entities may be physical, but they have non-physical properties. So most people now-a-days are on board with (1). But rejecting (2) is very hard to do at the same time. The problem is that a functional network of neurons (whatever makes up an NCC) doesn't have the same properties as experience, holistic, no gaps, a "feel" that is very modal (smells vs. colors vs. tastes. vs. pains, etc...), how does all the modality get in there? Where is the "orange" part, can you point to it, much less the "subjective" part of it, the part where the orange stops and the blue starts, and the part where blue stops and "smell" starts. I mean, let's be very concrete. When you pull a single hair on your arm, a neural column of almost exactly 1000 neurons goes active, the minimal unique signal for the little "pain" of it. It's a very specific feeling, but it's very hard to get your head around the fact that it's *these* 1000 neurons firing in a pattern together that's giving rise to *this* pain. I mean, you can literally count them: 1000, and watch them firing in a Hebbian pattern, chug, chug, chug. At what nanosecond do we get "pain"? So the point is, your (obweaver's) reply to Maximus is ok if all you're saying that cns cannot exist without the NCC. But when Maximus said that the NCC can't fully "explain" cns, that's a little different question that's much harder. Just because we know NCC->cns doesn't mean that we are sure the physical info of the NCC explains everything there is to know about the experience, its first person nature, its "likeness", etc. Ok, all that said, my opinion is actually that there is a 'logical' connection between NCC and experience and that the knowledge and conceivability arguments are wrong. But I recognize that there's an "explanation gap" and I have to give reasons why the physical info gives rise to *this* experience. I have some ideas, and I know books that have some ideas, but I don't personally think this question has been fully answered yet and we can't make much any headway until at least they get something like a non-invasive realtime map of NCC dynamics at the synaptic level, something at that level of specificity to start modeling and theorizing over. Good luck in that happening any time soon. Then again, maybe it'll just be another 100 years and our grandkids will find an answer to it. It's just my intuition that there really is an answer; I just don't have illusions how tough the problem really is.

HUD? We don't need no stinking HUD.

Careful or your definition will cover Tom Arnold. (at least circa 1990s; pudgy, Rosanne, "The Tom Show")

Sounds to me like Smoove B. While I am freaking you, I will whisper various things in your ear. Some of the phrases I will say to you are, "Baby, you are my everything," "You feel so good, I can't stand it," and, "Girl, ride me." There will also be candles and a CD featuring the music of Keith Sweat to create an atmosphere of unbridled romance, making you wet. This is how you will get Smooved. Just say the word, and we will share interplanetary cocoa love until the break of dawn. We will bump across the galaxy, exploring the known solar system with our passion. We will journey to places even the astronomers have never been. We will bump to Pluto, as well as to the moon.

I took a class on this ages ago. But I do remember my prof pointing out that you sometimes see, like in movies, a tent at night using a red light, e.g., for pilots getting ready for a night-flight or soldiers planning a raid or whatever, so when they run out of the tent they won't have to worry about their eyes adjusting to the night; everything will be clear right away ... because red is the least sensitive, as obscurus said. And apparently all of this is by design (natural selection), something to do with red just not being around at night, so it wasn't built into the night-vision system (part of the whole theme of vision about the tension between 2 competing systems: animalistic, b/w, night vision, "fuzzy", motion sensitive vs. high detail, daytime, vivid color, etc.). By the way, while we're on this completely irrelevant tangent , a curious thing is that we *see* colors in a cycle where red and violent actually connect (the color wheel, roygbiv), whereas in reality the spectrum is linear from red (low energy) to violent (higher energy), and there's no logical reason why it has to stop at red and violent, much less for them to seem to actually connect. It's just to say that our visual experience is somewhat an arbitrary selection of the total spectrum and has as much to do with biology and natural selection than what's the "reality".

This thread reminds me of watching movies with my film-studies neighbor.* Seriously every scene he'd want to point out what the director was doing with the lighting, or the blocking, or the camera ... usually stopping the film to literally point it out, as if the smallest details had a purpose. I quickly learned if I was going to watch a movie with him, it wasn't to passively enjoy it and take it for granted, but to always be on the look out for how the director did things. I actually found it very interesting, because he could spot important things better than I could ... but other friends couldn't stand it! Now when I watch movies, though, I can't help thinking like that a little, from his influence. *(now working on films in Europe, one in Budapest, another in Belfast. Reminds me I need to look him up).

My favorite (fringe) theory is that some massive body passed through the solar system and in the course ripped off a chunk off of Earth, which fell back to become the moon, the rest of it becoming Pangea. (it also apparently obliterated the planet after Mars (making the asteroid belt), and it ripped off chunks off other planets making their moons, as well, and by looking at the rotational differences of different moons, the guy actually plotted the trajectory and rough planet arrangement, allowing him to date it ... convienently to 65 million years ago, his version of the extinction of dinosaurs, which carries the necessary implication of dino fossils on the moon , and the beginning of Pangea's break-up, as well as weird stuff like out-of-place boulders, what we now usually attribute to glaciers). I don't think it is credible, certainly the dating part (the idea of the gravity of another body pulling off the moon I don't know, but I've never heard it anywhere else, which probably means no one takes it seriously), but I really liked the guy's enthusiasm in putting facts together and seeing how far he could go. It's sort of like recreational psudo-science, trying to figure out where his reasoning works and where it might go astray. Even if a theory is wrong, people may disagree *why* it's wrong, and that itself can be interesting.

Not exactly, although people do (so far) get "killed", well, gunned down by military guards for being found where they aren't supposed to be. Another thing I was wondering about ... has there been any team that's used modding to make a (good) movie via screencapture. It seems natural because you could make really elaborate sets and characters (AI) and then just script in the basic blocking, throw in some cool particle effects and events with objects, etc, set the camera and its motions, and let each scene play out. And then maybe add in facial emotions and mouth movements, etc, even afterwards. Esp if you use stock assets, the main outside thing to add would just be voice acting, sounds, and music. I mean I know this has probably been done, but have there been any good ones. If the writing were good, this also has a lot of potential to make something good relatively cheap and easy. (although maybe then you couldn't market it unless the engine and assets were all custom.) I'm thinking a big limitation would actually be the writing (and time to do it) ... although I'm sure there are technical reasons why it's not so popular ... limited or unrealistic movements of the AI, limited stuff you can do with the camera, difficulty blocking, sequencing events in tandem. But then again, there have been some kick ass cartoons, like in the 80s, that had relatively simple animation but awesome writing that were still great.

There are like a million of those kinds of books! Seriously, I went to Barnes and Nobles (bookstore) to that section and *make your own movie* books, from writing to storyboarding to cinematography to producing, were everywhere. So I've been working on a treatment for a little while and sometimes wonder if I could make something out of it. I really like the idea and I can see it having a kind of mass-cult market appeal like Blair Witch did if it's made and promoted correctly. I mean, it's custom made for the reality generation. Maybe when I'm ready and have a little money I'll get in touch with some of you guys to help me think about how I'd want to do it.

Well, science is science. No place for politics in a decision like this. (edit: I'm actually being ironic in saying this; I tend to think it's *mostly* a kind of politics and science is playing a supporting role at best.) I suppose to be consistent we ought to stop kidding ourselves and similarly admit that Europe and Asia are (scientifically speaking, you know, since this is entirely a scientific question) one continent (Eurasia) and Australia merely the largest island. As for my real opinion, I agree with a lot of the scientists from the recent conference that actually this isn't an important, or even very relevant, issue to science at all, since it is about nomenclature ... while most of the scientific debate is about the processes that create solar systems, which this decision will hardly effect. It's about the same way in which geology isn't about continents so much as plate techtonics, and whether you label some land masses as continents vs. islands, the theory doesn't care so much. Nomenclature is largely just for social uses or human-centered purposes, which is why it has to bend to both science (the facts on the ground) and a lilttle politics. But anyway, apparently this decision has been coming for a long time, scientists just feel more comfortable being a little consistent if they're going to claim authority based on reason, so it's no surprise ... and no one is really in a position to seriously disagree with them. So it goes.

Thanks to goldfish, I'm totally going to build my own movie projector now and wow all my friends with one of our high-school projectors being put to good use. It looks fun to do just for the sake of doing it.

Keep the faith, team. Of course the beauty of the Darkmod is it will be more than one campaign ... you're laying a foundation so one guy *can* make his own map or even campaign. And of course this team has showed every indication so far of being more dedicated. But all that work to get the assets, I can see how it's a long road... And it's disheartening to see these big TCs go down. But keep the faith, nonetheless. I wonder in the future if there isn't a movement for artists to start putting up public domain assets for all the big genres -- scifi, medieval, contemporary, urban, forest, etc. -- as they are inspired, so it builds a large repository of high-quality public domain assets over time ... in expectation that big TC projects will coattail on their work (since it seems like the largest time/effort drain of everything) so they can focus on the gameplay aspects. Is that wishful thinking, or even practical? Looks like spar's call for help sort of fell on deaf ears so far in that thread (it's still early in the thread, though) ... like they aren't even finished burying the dead, but I hope that some of them join the team here. I'd imagine some of them would like to think they can work on something that sees completion. Let's hope so.

Shows how much you're glossing the movement and not really trying to look into the real-world, psychological/socio-political motivations going on beneath the surface. To me, it's the most natural thing that they'll tend go anti-govt. It's like most "evangelical" periods in history are built on an anti-establishment base ... even if it's in or *is* the establishment. "Running against the grain" is part of the ethos that they have to tell themselves, in about the same way existentialism is ... because you're making a "radical" "personal" choice, by definition it's supposed to be "diverging" from the beaten path and not something you can adopt as being part of the establishment. I mean, I like looking at groups like this because they usually have their finger on the pulse of deeper socio-economic and cultural undercurrents of the country in trying to vent them. They're frustrated with the superficial lifestyle that modern capitalist societies so easily fall into, like a lot of people are, and the dead-blah glob we watch it turn our daytime-TV-watching friends into ... and they're trying to break out in the only way they can see how. The main issue to me isn't their motivations so much as their integrity to be critically minded towards their own beliefs and really take them seriously if they're going to believe it, like a professor of mine used to say: If you say you believe it, you really better believe it. I think of it is our duty to be benevolent and show them a more responsible way to enlightenment and personal spiritual awareness that is every bit as invigorating and meaningful in the face of the grey-blah of modern "soulless" capitalist socieities but that also shows integrity and honesty with the world as scientists have spent the last 400 years fighting to understand ... or why even bother struggling to understand the universe! Haha ... there's my manifesto; I've been caught!

Sounds like some left brain vs right brain squaring off in this thread. I think I'm somewhere in the middle as well, or so they tell me.