T w e n t y S i d e d
Created by OnePlusYou
Ah Crap
Created by OnePlusYou
Created by OnePlusYou
Starcraft: Bot Fight
I’m not sure who will find this interesting. This is an AI analysis of a ten year old videogame. This entire endeavor will sound absurd to people familiar with the game in question, and hopelessly esoteric to those that aren’t. Still, I’m putting this up in case there is someone else out there who is just as peculiar as I am, in that I find this sort of thing intensely compelling.
About a month ago I wrote a Starcraft scenario which allowed you to observe a game between AI players. I’ve been curious about the quirks in the Starcraft AI and I’ve wanted a chance to see them do their thing in a deterministic environment. I learned some surprising things about this ten-year-old gem. While the races themselves are very nearly balanced in the hands of humans, it turns out the AI is a lot better at using some races compared to others.
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| This is a very pixelated map of The Hunters. The map has eight starting locations, marked by the colored squares. Players are randomly placed on the map, with one random spot left empty. |
I’d usually let the game run overnight and check on the results in the morning. (Yes! This was my solution for being too busy to play computer games, I programmed a game to play itself for me!) A game normally takes a couple of hours, although rarely one will end in an hour, and several became endless stalemates.
At first I just set the difficulty to “normal”, but I found that the computer players were far too likely to consume all the resources on the map, go broke, and then just sit there. I’d start a game before going to bed, and when I came back in the morning I’d find the battle was down to three sides who couldn’t make any fighting units. I changed the difficulty to “Insane”, which auto-cheats by giving itself 2,000 minerals and gas anytime it goes broke, meaning the thing is always rolling in resources. This made sure that most battles came to a proper conclusion. Although this made battles larger, more spectacular, and a little more chaotic, it didn’t seem to affect who won. I ran many overnight battles with both AI setups, and while higher difficulty made for inflated scores, over many games the results painted a clear picture. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Starcraft: Bot Fight”
Testing New Theme: Lawful Good
A few weeks ago I was working at tweaking the existing theme for the site and making a few improvements. It turned into an unintentional overhaul, and then I got sidetracked and didn’t get time to complete it. I thought I’d make it available now and get some feedback and see if anyone spots any problems. It works in IE7, Firefox, and Safari. I haven’t tested it in IE6, but I’m sure it will look like a train wreck. The theme relies heavily on masked PNGs, and IE6 doesn’t go in for that sort of business.
To see the theme, just go to the front page and use the dropdown box on the right, select “Lawful Good”.
The goals I had for this theme:
- I liked the “glossy surface” thing going in the current theme, and I wanted to expand on that.
- The old sidebar is hopelessly over-cluttered, and I wanted to trim it down. The archives have grown and now take up a lot of screen real estate, so I’ve moved them and other lesser used items to the bottom of the page. The new sidebar is a lot lighter and hopefully more useful. (Search is now at the top.)
- I wanted to back off from the pure white background. The major problem with the old theme was that it was just too dang bright for some people. At the time I couldn’t just dim the background by a couple of shades, because all of the logos and dice images would have ugly white boxes around them. I’ve fixed this so the the images are now very tolerant of background color changes – pretty much any light color will work.
- I wanted to clean up the sprawling, hackish code of the old theme. Not that it matters to visitors, but this theme uses a lot less code to get the job done.
- I wanted to replace the current black / white themes with Chaotic Evil / Lawful Good, which would make for a nice meta-theme.
- I wanted more dice. I’m still working on this. I really like the handful of dice at the bottom of the page, though.
Yes, I know glossy silver doesn’t exactly match the purported content of this site. A proper RPG site theme would probably be cartography / papyrus / middle ages, and a proper videogame theme would probably just have iconic characters splashed around. But there are already a lot of sites along those lines. And besides – this really does it for me, visually. I guess I’d rather the site theme look sexy than make sense.
It’s not perfect, but it’s an interesting work in progress. If anyone wants to put up a shot of how it looks in IE6 I’d like to see it. Please let me know about any problems / errors you find. Or just let me know what you think of it.
EDIT: One further note is that the new theme assumes a desktop width of at least 1024. Up until now I’ve stuck with 800, but I noticed that people running in 800×600 has vanished to almost nothing over the last couple of years. Less than 1% right now according to my web stats.
ALSO: To get back to the old theme, return to the front page, look in the left sidebar. It’s right under “search”. It’s a list instead of a dropdown list.
The Next Day: I’ve made some minor changes to get rid of the h-scrolling everyone is getting. I haven’t really addressed the major gripes with the theme, but this quick fix should make it a little more useful. A fuller overhaul will have to wait until I have more time.
Impulse
Brad Wardel, president of Stardock, was nice enough to stop by and leave a comment explaining a bit more about how Impulse is going to work. (Impulse is their upcoming content delivery system, which I mentioned here.) His comment in full:
Hi guys,
A couple things about Impulse that aren’t readily known yet.
1) Impulse does NOT require any DRM or activation. Individual programs may use it but it isn’t required. You don’t have to keep Impulse running or what have you. Even on things that do have activation, it’s only on installation (and you have to be connected obvoiusly to download it in the first place).
2) Impulse will be adding a lot of community features. For instance, Stardock, Gas Powered Games, and Ironclad are teaming up to build a unified multiplayer network for strategy games that will be made freely available to other developers who want robust match making in their games.
3) Impulse will have a lot of major third party content on it shortly. By end of the year, most major game publishers and many major PC software companies will have their content on Impulse.
I love Steam. I use it more often than I should for TF2 and such. But it strikes me as something largely designed for first person shooters when it comes to getting games going (I mean you can launch Company of Heroes but it’s not like their server list includes company of heroes games in it). Impulse will let you browse through multiple strategy games for open games or press a button and find someone for you to play which I think is a pretty big deal — since I like strategy games.
From a “DRM” standpoint, this is exactly what I would expect from Stardock: Treating people like customers and not like an army of amoral data pirates. In a perfect world, this wouldn’t even be praiseworthy behavior. This would be about as remarkable and heroic as not giving your date a suplex at the end of the evening. This advice should be so obvious as to make you feel like an idiot for bothering to utter it. But I have not found a way to inhabit that perfect world, which means I have to give credit to Stardock and their dedication to their suplex-free customer service. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Impulse”
Old Memes
No time for anything substantive today. Instead, check out these exceptionally old memes, which may be so old they’re new again. All three five are strangely disturbing and compelling in their own way. A sort of, “how did this come to be?” Perhaps you missed one.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Old Memes”
I Got Some Rest!
For the last few days my body, chief victim of my ambitions, has issued vigorous protest against the things I was asking of it. Indeed, protest was the only thing it was willing to do with any degree of vigor. Its complaints were coldly rebuffed; I’m simply too busy to be bossed around by my body, which I view as nothing more than a support system for the all-important brain, which has a bunch of important stuff going on if you don’t mind, so suck it up.
But the body cannot subsist on willpower alone. Jedi Knights notwithstanding, the mastery of the mind over the body is a tenuous relationship, and one which is easily reversed. For example… Continue reading ⟩⟩ “I Got Some Rest!”
April Fooled
Right now on the YouTube front page, every single one of the featured videos links to the same Rickroll. The videos themselves have thumbnails that indicate they are really something else, which means this can only be a practical joke on the part of YouTube. (That is, different thumbnails and descriptions, linking to the same video with the same ID. That’s not normally possible.)
As an aside, I’ve always wondered if Rick Astley knew that his 80’s pop song has become the payload for an internet meme / prank, and what his reaction was. Turns out he’s a really good sport about it:
In a March 2008 interview, Astley said that he found the rickrolling of Scientology to be “hilarious”; he also said that he will not try to capitalize on the rickroll phenomenon with a new recording or remix of his own, but that he’d be happy to have other artists remix it. Overall, Astley is fine with the phenomenon, although he finds it a little “bizarre” and only hopes that his daughter receives no embarrassment over it
Elsewhere:
- Blizzard Entertainment announces World of Warcraft: Molten Core. Be sure to watch the trailer.
- Darths and Droids: Lawyer’d!
From The Archives:
How I Plan To Rule This Dumb Industry
Here is how I'd conquer the game-publishing business. (Hint: NOT by copying EA, 2K, Activision, Take-Two, or Ubisoft.)
Seven Springs
The true story of three strange days in 1989, when the last months of my adolescence ran out and the first few sparks of adulthood appeared.
Quakecon 2012 Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
The Best of 2017
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.
A Star is Born
Remember the superhero MMO from 2009? Neither does anyone else. It was dumb. So dumb I was compelled to write this.
Self-Balancing Gameplay
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
Wolfenstein II
This is a massive step down in story, gameplay, and art design when compared to the 2014 soft reboot. Yet critics rated this one much higher. What's going on here?
Trusting the System
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
Why I Hated Resident Evil 4
Ever wonder how seemingly sane people can hate popular games? It can happen!
Silver Sable Sucks
This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.