demagogue

Yes, I like the city street in particular, too. It's exciting to think that these are just showing what's possible, and that things can only look better from here.

I think it would be much better to be more liberal with the Beta-Mapping position as it gets closer to release. Public-betas are bad ideas, esp with something like this, because people will treat the release as if it's a finished product (warning or not), and it just isn't finished, and shouldn't get any notion of being "public" until all the core stuff is in, IMHO. But I think, as I just said, it may be a good idea near release time to start letting even newbie mappers try out the system as a beta-mapper, (esp if they have a nice full Komag tut to guide them by then ) just to see if there are any issues from their perspective.

I know you guys have probably already talked about it, but what it sounds like is that the easiest stuff to postpone are the non-essential, labor-intensive, discrete stuff like specific AI, textures, objects, ambients that are relatively easy to add to the package piecemeal ... and it's the core mechanics, and some core AI, textures, and objects that will come out in release 1.0. Well, it sounds like a reasonable plan, like out-sourcing labor-intensive stuff to the community post-release. I'd also think you really want to get the core mechanics down as tightly as possible before the first release. Anyway, I don't think I'm making any new revelation, but just thinking aloud for the sake of the public forum.

Awesome. This is a nice surprise ... had me laughing. I couldn't understand the words, but most of it was intuitive... "Oh, just a panda." The messed up pathfinding was funny. And I got a good laugh out of the point-blank arrow hit, too. Who made this, by the way? Seems like it'd be someone in the community.

Yeah, it is looking better each round. It's cool if you find a good balance between inspiration and artistic freedom, because that will make it fun to go through, at once familiar but still some surprises ... and maybe change up the objectives a little to make it feel fresh. There's a video somewhere of someone's interpretation of the bow upgrade. They built an alarus extension in dromed and a platform to get to it. Then the video is in-game, he jumps into the A.E., grabs the bow upgrade, which draws the bow now labeled "bow (upgraded)", and it turns the bow into something like firing RPG-arrows, and then he goes running around blowing zombies to hell with huge explosions. Pretty awesome! If you can find it, watch it ... *that* would be a cool thing to try to pull off.

Desk? That's how I read this. It (sort of) rhymes, anyway.

From someone who has studied both German and Japanese, German is of course faster/easier to learn, since English is in part a Germanic language after all, it picks up fast. Japanese is fun just because the kanji ramp it up to a whole new level, like really learning an alien language. There may be changes in the grammer based on social hierarchy, but you really don't have to learn any of that to be conversational and it shouldn't be a deterrent. E.g., you most often omit the word "I" and "you" altogether, so it doesn't matter which word you use. And it has a grammatical structure, just one that doesn't map well onto Western languages. They actually have interesting similarities (compared to English): the pronunciation virtually always follows directly from the spelling, and the grammer follows pretty regular rules with few exceptions; both have troves of neologisms (I think is the term), the ability to cram smaller words together to make up new words, and you can apparently just keep stacking them up. Also, in both languages you very often have to wait until the damn end of the sentence to hear the verb to have any idea what's going on!

It sounds gamey to me, as well, about on par with racing games with the cars in front of you that slow down so you can catch up, and burst with speed when they are left behind to be suddenly on your tail. There is a distinct line between actual "game" and an interactive movie that's just playing out for your entertainment. I have less of a problem with AI appearing to "learn" things from the PC's actions (patterns of behavior), though, if it isn't gamey like this, but even here I stand with thinking it's best done ad hoc by the builder, with scripting or whatnot, rather than wasting the team's time making it a default attribute.

Babelfish is telling me "fröhlich und schadenfroh" = "merrily and harm-gladly". I understand how gleeful = "merrily" ... but I'm not sure how gleeful = "harm-gladly". Sounds like a very bad translation (on Babelfish's part) that's confused me.

Who are you on TTLG? The story of my nick is actually there somewhere if you want to look it up (when it's back up). But long story short, it's from a spoof website I put up when I first learned HTML (still in the wee early days of the net) for recruiting minions to do my evil bidding, me being the benevolent demagogue of course. I made a lot of those spoof kinds of pages in those days, most sort of on the dark side, just to practice making sites and as a creative outlet (since I made them to look good) ... a LBJ/Nixon fanpage, one celebrating medieval Arab invaders and torture methods, some sites for philosophers I liked, etc.

I just noticed in the last map I made that AI in the original Thief can randomize the next patrol way-point they'll go to, which in effect randomizes them backtracking sometimes and not others. I think simple things like this (easy for the builder to design and control) are really the way to go, and not something too complicated to predict and control, since it will largely be up to a builder how random behavior will effect gameplay in the context of his map. Another thing, it seems a lot of the stuff you mention re: in game "learning" could be taken care of with scripting.

For the record, this debate reminds me of the debate in behavioral economics that "intellegent" actors, at least when they're doing strategic behavior, are self-consciously a little random (predictably random!) just so their competitor can't predict exactly what they'll do, while they can still be optimal at the same time. This is one reason why Pavlov was wrong (all actions aren't s/r reflexes, arguably none) and why building some of this into video game AI makes for good gaming. A slightly different debate here is on rule following and generativity (being "original"), which works for some types of rules like chess and language. Too much to explain here, though.

It'd be nice as an option for the toughest difficulty, better for replayability ... but I doubt devs are going to line up to implement something like this, with the heavy load of work, if it's not going to be used much. By the way, my undergrad cogsci/AI professor (Risto Miikkulainen) at U Texas has been involved in this sort of project for years now, engineering this sort of stuff, or one version of it, for video games and the military, the NEAT project (Neuro-Evolution of Augmenting Topologies). E.g., they have a demo game out called NERO (Neuro Evolving Robotic Operatives), which plays with putting NEAT into real time... you have to defeat little invading robot armies, RTS style, that get progressively smarter and learn from your defenses with each advance, and also a project for FPSs, right now apparently focusing on goal-directed navigation and, very cool I think, a platform for a uniform interface to a library of computer game environments.

Well, to be fair, most genres have a problem with mindless shooting fests and could use a little more imagination. Also, it's not always clear what "strategic" means in the FPS context (so when you see the word, it's maybe forgiveable to misunderstand what's going on). Deus Ex claimed to allow players "strategic" choices in going through a scene, but I got the feeling by this they meant there was some flexibility between which weapon you'd rely on, big and loud or small and silent, or sometimes you could find a back way in or sneak through, or some areas had some "puzzle" to them to cross, etc, but IMO these really aren't so much "strategic" decisions as the word is used in most other game contexts like RTS, planning ahead and countering AI/other player strategies, and really making hard, on-the-fly cost/benefit sorts of decisions. This is another way that the potential in FPSs has barely been scratched, I think (mostly because of lackluster AI and again a failure of imagination).

Nope. And for the record, of course, I hope TDM becomes just as popular as dromeding, or -- what the hell -- even more so ... although I'll be a fan whatever the case. I just couldn't resist Dram's nice set-up.

Sounds like a good idea, Spar. It has to be said that the potential for FPSs has hardly been scratched, I think. More than any other genre I think it could really use some imagination and people taking it in new directions, especially in weening it off of mindless shooting as the main M.O.

Surprise!

Uh, real life?

More like nobody is interested in this mod. Check your facts, mister.

I think if there should be a remake, you should go for a *really* oldschool game, like Bard's Tale or Zork or something (or my idea, Guild of Thieves), where you could keep the story but really, totally recreate the world in a vastly different modality. Now that would be a rush. There just isn't enough added value IMHO with remaking the OMs (even putting aside copyright issues); it's like a song cover ... it just sounds dumb unless it's really offering something new.

For the record, I read the script again in my free time just a few days ago, totally independently, and I didn't remember this line, (I mean, a lot of lines were slightly different) and anyway I didn't have the images connected to the lines, which is why I double-checked (since it's obviously BW as the main character). Edit: It's there in my script, though. Funny part of the movie, anyway. Of course I remember the scene and line now.

I don't recognize it right off. Fifth Element?

It seems the awesome express is back in town.

Just to fill out the implications of that, that suggests the collision model, if it isn't varying by head height, and you want head bob, will have to be set at the highest head height setting. For as troublesome as jiggering into tight spaces was in the original series, at the same time it did open up more player freedom by covering slightly tighter spaces than could be done without this effect, when the current height of your head is the ultimate judge of how low you can go, and not a set boundary always below which your head bobs (possibly unintuitively). Don't get me wrong, the trade-off may be worth it in player convienence, my intuition is that it probably is, but I think it should be seen as something of a trade-off.

I think Komag meant warm for a refridgerator. 55-65 deg F is still pretty cool (13-18 degrees celsius); it's below room temperature. It sounds like an ok idea, even a fridge turned off would be better than just a cabinet, since a fridge is temperature sealed. On that note, maybe you could just put a seal on a cabinet so the sunlit warmer air doesn't affect it too much. (?)