So, your AI routine is running. Taking into account for the enemy field of view, light levels, camouflage, distance, cover, and general threat awareness (like, are there any suspicious dead bodies lying around?) the program has determined that the bad guy has, in fact, spotted the player. Time to start shooting.
Not so fast.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “AI Follies: Targeting”
(This was going to wait until I began my series on The Path, but a couple of ludicrous comments have hastened my posting here. Fine. Let’s get this over with.)
People are shocked, shocked! that the “Shamus they thought they knew” could possibly like The Path.
Look, let’s get this straight right now. This game is filled with strange imagery. Very little of it is sexual. (SPOILER: Basically, the part with Carmen) It’s okay if you think the game is stupid or offensive or boring or just don’t like it. BUT, if you subscribe to this line of thought:
1) You saw this game and concluded that, despite the strange non-sexual images, it was simply about the literal rape of six underage girls…
AND
2) You conclude that this is the only possible conclusion that anyone could come to and thus EVERYONE sees this game this way…
AND
3) Despite all my previous thoughts on childhood, fear, and growing up, I was actually “into” the game because it was “all about rape”…
AND
4) You believe that since I like the game and the game is about rape and only rape, and so I must therefore “like rape” or “approve” of rape.
THEN:
Leave. Go away. No, don’t go down to the comments and tell me how much I disappointed you, because your opinion now has no value to me. If you think so little of me that my endorsement of this game leads you to such conclusions, then I couldn’t have disappointed you because nothing I’ve ever written before now has ever left any sort of impression on you. You should just leave and not come back.
Even if the game WAS about rape, my approval of the game wouldn’t be approval of rape. It’s possible to like the movie se7en without liking cutting the heads off of innocent people. And not everyone who watched Silence of the Lambs thought it was okay to eat people.
If the above forehead-slamming train of simplistic thought has led you to reject me as an evil man or a bad father, then I’m seriously creeped out by you. Bye.
Hopefully I won’t be hearing more from the “OMG Shamus likes rape” crowd, but fair warning: I will be mercilessly and unflinchingly deleting comments. I am not kidding when I say you people creep me out and you are not welcome here.
I promised I’d write a villanelle at some point. It was certainly more challenging than I expected, but I liked the result.
Okay, it’s not a strict villanelle. At the end, I varied the wording of the final phrase. I’ve seen this done in a villanelle before, and I do think it makes the form more potent.
This is the 117th comic I’ve made, but I’m pretty sure this is the very first time I ever thought, “I wonder how [the game designer] would react to this?”
I haven’t put more than a couple of hours into the game, but it has stirred up an unprecedented surge of creative energy.
Here are some thoughts on the goals of an AI programmer, which should have gone at the beginning of this series. Let me put them up now before we go any further.
My first computer (which you can read about here) was the Tandy MC-10. 4k of memory. Less than a single megahertz of speed. Once I got my programming legs under me, the first thing I tried to do was make a game clone Pac-Man. For reference, here is what the original looked like:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “AI Follies: Interesting Behavior”
Apologies all around to everyone. I heard there was a TF2 update. Normally when this happens, I just need to log in, poke the “reboot” button, and it sorts itself out. The update is completely automated. People kept sending me emails: “Hey Shamus, there was a TF2 update. Sever needs a restart.”
I’d restart it, and wander off. Then the next day I’d get another email, “Hey Shamus, there was a TF2 update. Sever needs a restart.”
Wow. Another one? Okay then. *Poke.*
This went on all week until I actually looked into it this morning. Turns out the server wasn’t needing an update. It HAD updated, and was now crashing. The new version conflicts with SourceMod, which does… some thing important relating to administrating the server that I can’t quite remember at the moment. From the SourceMod forums:
Boo. I’ve disabled SourceMod and I’m in the process of restarting everything and checking it this time.
Thanks again to everyone who donated.
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The Path is an indie game from Tale of Tales. (Not to be confused with Telltale Games.) It goes back to the original stories of Little Red Riding Hood and turns them into a series of disturbing interactive adventures. It’s survival horror, but without the “survival” part. (Maybe.)
When I say “survival horror”, note that I’m talking more about Silent Hill and less about Resident Evil. In fact, The Path is about as far from the narrative of Resident Evil as you can hope to get. You might have trouble understanding The Path because it’s open and ambiguous, while you might have trouble understanding Resident Evil because it was written by drunken chimpanzees. The Path is subtle, unnerving, playful, and full of imagery. This is not a game that tries to scare us with tentacle zombies popping out of closets. This is a game that tries to scare us by showing us the parts of life that usually go unregarded. A lot of games tackle the question of “can games be art?” The Path seems to be asking, “can art be a game?”
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The events you see will be “open to interpretation”. You can view it as a painful journey of children brushing up against the adult world. Or you can take a literal approach and see it as a game where you steer six girls into situations where they are possibly molested, murdered, menaced, or raped. There’s no blood, no nudity, but both violence and sex are alluded to, so don’t go buying this for your kids just because it has Lil’ Red Riding Hood.
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I hate to say too much about events that unfold in the game, because to relate them is to interpret them, and I don’t want to impose too many of my impressions onto your experience. I went into the game with very little idea of what I would find, and so I found a lot of myself in it. If I’d read an overview I might have gone in expecting more and getting less.
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If you’re like me and you’ve been lamenting about how games have been stuck in a rut of boilerplate storytelling and carbon-copy gameplay, then you owe it to yourself to check out The Path. I don’t give the game my full endorsement as a game, but I give it full marks for having a bold vision and running with it. It’s innovative, unique, and it’s only ten bucks.
In keeping with the series on AI, here is an interesting project: Mario AI Competition, a competition for people to build the best Mario-playing AI possible. Here is one of the entries:
Link (YouTube) |
Here is the project page for the particular AI featured in the video.
The Mario game itself is a procedurally generated infinite level. John Funk likened this to putting a slinky on an escalator.
Interesting stuff.
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
Grand Theft Auto is a lousy, cheating jerk of a game.
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
When the source code for Doom 3 was released, we got a look at some of the style conventions used by the developers. Here I analyze this style and explain what it all means.
Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How big would it be?
His problem isn't that he's dumb, the problem is that he bends the world he inhabits.
Is it real? Is PC gaming returning to its former glory? Sort of. It's complicated.
A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.
This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
So what happens when a SOFTWARE engineer tries to review hardware? This. This happens.
T w e n t y S i d e d
