My knowledge of GA is very limited, but as far as I know they operate on principle of random values, and betting on algorithm coming up with a good solution.
Honestly, I would not feel good living in a city where the public services company is treating my water supplies with a random-operation-based algorithm, or with random-operation-based algorithm controlling any kind of military equipment.
It's probably just paranoia in me, but bugs in that kind of applications might result in scary consequences. (Or at least it's easy to imagine something like that happening.)
At our Faculty (www.fer.hr), reservations for "lab practices" is done via genetic algorithms. It's kinda hard to assemble over 500 people for your class to be assigned times when they don't have any other class (there are numerous combinations of classes one can take), and to reduce the time which they have to wait after their last class ends before they are meant to go to the "lab practice".
In case I didn't make much sense -- optimal schedules for students!
Thing is, large portion of the society actively dislikes copyright. Authors are a minority. Spammers and identity thieves are also a disliked minority. Most definitely authors are not criminals, but making governments listen to their every whim in an effort to save "money milk factories"? No thanks.
What happens to the "free market" thing? If publishing music and software without copyright and DRM is not profitable, then people should just switch to farming. Western city-dwellers speak of how there's not enough food in the world, there's not enough oil in the world, but none of them desires to farm the land and enjoys driving the cars.
Free market and lack of copyright would destroy music/software publishing industries, and probably only book printing industry would survive since they actually manufacture physical stuff.
Although I'm presenting a completely anti-copyright opinion here, that's not the entire opinion I hold. I'm aware that programmers like me would have no food on the table in case copyright system was completely disrupted today. Copyright-less world is, from today's perspective, completely utopistic. But justice is often utopistic.
Actually, if I bought a product, I should have a right to do whatever-the-fsck-I-want with it. If I get a candybar, I should be able to "copy" it however I want to. If I knew how, I would. And for computer data, I very well know how to do it.
That's theoretical of course, reality is something different. But understand this: copyright and patents are not natural rights, they are granted by the society. They are rights to take away other people's freedoms. Copyright may have served books well, but in "digital millennium" they are barely enforceable and outdated anachronisms of a past era.
If you can't control 1 billion Chinese and others from replicating a trademarked work, how will you control 6 billion Earthmen from replicating copyrighted work?
Entitlement generation -- I love the expression, where'd ya pick it up? And I'm sad it won't come close soon.
Let's face it, copyright serves so companies and people like me could earn money off their products. It's not a right, it's a tool. No, scratch that -- more like a toy. A toy that should be taken away from the babies.
Many companies surely fear how would public opinion form about their code, i.e. they're ashamed of what they did. And I don't look only at smaller companies or indies here.
While it may sometimes be useful for ultra high end developers to reduce size of their games, let's face it, most developers don't need that. And high end developers don't really care as evidenced by continuous increase in average game size. So -- most developers will use procedural generation only for universe or map generation. (I consider vegetation to be a part of universe or map.)
And I've mentioned this use in both of my posts:)
Yes, you can say that today, horsepower is what limits the procedural generation. But I don't really see it that way. It takes some time to balance the algorithms for most visual applications. It's still easier for artists to generate the textures during development as opposed to generating them on-the-fly. In most of the cases.
By the way, Infinity Universe is amazing. Thanks for the link:)
Look at our website and then get sources here. Project is called YATC - Yet Another Tibia Client. This is a FLOSS client using protocol of game called Tibia, mostly developed to work with OpenTibia Server. We mostly need sprites since we currently depend on the graphics from proprietary client.
Well, replacing graphics for over 8000 items, not for the faint of the heart. If you wish, hop on, but I believe you'll be scared off:)
If you have any questions feel free to send me a mail (if you can dig out my email, it's surely somewhere in the above repository), or send me a note or anything via Slashdot. I'll be happy to explain everything to you.
I said, I think it's unnecessary to do procedural generation of textures at runtime. Seen how long.kkrieger takes to load?
And I already said this: unless you're trying to make a 96kb game, bake a texture in advance and be done with it.
DarkTree seems to offer a lot of plugins for various 3D tools, and not runtime procedural generation. I did not read TFA, but from the summary I believe it refers to runtime procedural generation of art. And I don't think that is really needed unless you're producing an AAA+ title.
Fully agreed. As a coder involved in a FLOSS game project (as well as some commercial projects) I know first hand how hard it is to find a good graphics artist. Especially for a FLOSS project. It's much easier to find a good coder or at least a promising contributor than a usable artist.
Personally, I don't find procedural content to be a savior here. It's most promising for automatic generation of large universes (see Elite, Elite Frontier,...) but not so much for the generation of textures. Unless you're creating a 96 kb 3D game.
Weird. I find that expression artistic or perhaps used for adding emphasis. I definitely would not find it wrong. Must be because English is my second language as well.
On the other hand... such constructs are (theoretically) illegal in my language as well, yet they are used for purposes I mentioned.
Just America? Don't forget, it's your culture that's being shoved down the world's collective throat, so we're all getting "wussified". And as you said, it's not a good thing.
Asimov's robots are not computer-based. They are machines, but with structures very similar to brains. They are not initially programmed, their brains are structured and then programmed.
So their brain actually contains "burned-in" Laws, as structures. Only then they are programmed; and thus they cannot violate the laws. Any comparison involving implementing Laws as program code is invalid.
In real life, robot's behaviour is defined by programming at all stages, so the Laws, as envisioned by Asimov, cannot really be applied.
Most Asimov's stories deal with problems arising from these laws. Asimov himself shows how these laws are inadequate or barely adequate. For example, in his Empire universe, robots, through temporal and dimensional manipulation wiped out all non-human life, and then wiped out themselves. In one story, robots manipulated the world economy... "to benefit mankind". They weren't harming anyone.
I'm not very familiar with Asimov's literature, but you seem to be even less familiar by quoting these laws in this context.
Slashdot Mirror
Haha :D
Recommended reading -- it may be fiction, but it's got some interesting, scary ideas. (I prefer Croatian translation, by the way, but whatever :P )
I think it's safe to use GAs for stuff like meeting schedules and toying around. For other things? Other stuff are ... safer :)
My knowledge of GA is very limited, but as far as I know they operate on principle of random values, and betting on algorithm coming up with a good solution.
Honestly, I would not feel good living in a city where the public services company is treating my water supplies with a random-operation-based algorithm, or with random-operation-based algorithm controlling any kind of military equipment.
It's probably just paranoia in me, but bugs in that kind of applications might result in scary consequences. (Or at least it's easy to imagine something like that happening.)
Real world application?
At our Faculty (www.fer.hr), reservations for "lab practices" is done via genetic algorithms. It's kinda hard to assemble over 500 people for your class to be assigned times when they don't have any other class (there are numerous combinations of classes one can take), and to reduce the time which they have to wait after their last class ends before they are meant to go to the "lab practice".
In case I didn't make much sense -- optimal schedules for students!
Thing is, large portion of the society actively dislikes copyright. Authors are a minority. Spammers and identity thieves are also a disliked minority. Most definitely authors are not criminals, but making governments listen to their every whim in an effort to save "money milk factories"? No thanks.
What happens to the "free market" thing? If publishing music and software without copyright and DRM is not profitable, then people should just switch to farming. Western city-dwellers speak of how there's not enough food in the world, there's not enough oil in the world, but none of them desires to farm the land and enjoys driving the cars.
Free market and lack of copyright would destroy music/software publishing industries, and probably only book printing industry would survive since they actually manufacture physical stuff.
Although I'm presenting a completely anti-copyright opinion here, that's not the entire opinion I hold. I'm aware that programmers like me would have no food on the table in case copyright system was completely disrupted today. Copyright-less world is, from today's perspective, completely utopistic. But justice is often utopistic.
...you sure about that? How can you be sure? :-)
Actually, if I bought a product, I should have a right to do whatever-the-fsck-I-want with it. If I get a candybar, I should be able to "copy" it however I want to. If I knew how, I would. And for computer data, I very well know how to do it.
That's theoretical of course, reality is something different. But understand this: copyright and patents are not natural rights, they are granted by the society. They are rights to take away other people's freedoms. Copyright may have served books well, but in "digital millennium" they are barely enforceable and outdated anachronisms of a past era.
If you can't control 1 billion Chinese and others from replicating a trademarked work, how will you control 6 billion Earthmen from replicating copyrighted work?
Entitlement generation -- I love the expression, where'd ya pick it up? And I'm sad it won't come close soon.
Let's face it, copyright serves so companies and people like me could earn money off their products. It's not a right, it's a tool. No, scratch that -- more like a toy. A toy that should be taken away from the babies.
Actually I never saw an infinite loop that DOES last forever :D
Many companies surely fear how would public opinion form about their code, i.e. they're ashamed of what they did. And I don't look only at smaller companies or indies here.
He never said he uses a spreadsheet (he uses a wordprocessor) and he never said he doesn't use OpenOffice :)
Ah my dear Watson :)
"Again, I say that it isn't really needed :)"
By "it" I of course mean "procedural generation of in game art" and I'd like to emphasize "...in most cases"
Again, I say that it isn't really needed :)
While it may sometimes be useful for ultra high end developers to reduce size of their games, let's face it, most developers don't need that. And high end developers don't really care as evidenced by continuous increase in average game size. So -- most developers will use procedural generation only for universe or map generation. (I consider vegetation to be a part of universe or map.)
And I've mentioned this use in both of my posts :)
Yes, you can say that today, horsepower is what limits the procedural generation. But I don't really see it that way. It takes some time to balance the algorithms for most visual applications. It's still easier for artists to generate the textures during development as opposed to generating them on-the-fly. In most of the cases.
By the way, Infinity Universe is amazing. Thanks for the link :)
Look at our website and then get sources here. Project is called YATC - Yet Another Tibia Client. This is a FLOSS client using protocol of game called Tibia, mostly developed to work with OpenTibia Server. We mostly need sprites since we currently depend on the graphics from proprietary client.
Well, replacing graphics for over 8000 items, not for the faint of the heart. If you wish, hop on, but I believe you'll be scared off :)
If you have any questions feel free to send me a mail (if you can dig out my email, it's surely somewhere in the above repository), or send me a note or anything via Slashdot. I'll be happy to explain everything to you.
...and I don't think that this site you mentioned has anything to do with runtime procedural content generation :)
I said, I think it's unnecessary to do procedural generation of textures at runtime. Seen how long .kkrieger takes to load?
And I already said this: unless you're trying to make a 96kb game, bake a texture in advance and be done with it.
DarkTree seems to offer a lot of plugins for various 3D tools, and not runtime procedural generation. I did not read TFA, but from the summary I believe it refers to runtime procedural generation of art. And I don't think that is really needed unless you're producing an AAA+ title.
Actually, it's a warning "Fire is burning! Fire is burning!" Guess I didn't put it in context. Like: "ZOMG!! FIRE!!!1 GET AWAI!1"
Fully agreed. As a coder involved in a FLOSS game project (as well as some commercial projects) I know first hand how hard it is to find a good graphics artist. Especially for a FLOSS project. It's much easier to find a good coder or at least a promising contributor than a usable artist.
...) but not so much for the generation of textures. Unless you're creating a 96 kb 3D game.
Personally, I don't find procedural content to be a savior here. It's most promising for automatic generation of large universes (see Elite, Elite Frontier,
Yes, I noticed. But I still find the construct acceptable for adding emphasis or for artistic purposes, precisely because it is unusual.
Besides, here are few good examples I couldn't think of yesterday:
"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust."
"Fire! Fire!"
Where do you find verbs there?
Hm, when his username is mentioned in same sentence as recursive acronyms, little voices in my head start screaming "RMS Microsoft" :) :) :)
Weird. I find that expression artistic or perhaps used for adding emphasis. I definitely would not find it wrong. Must be because English is my second language as well.
On the other hand ... such constructs are (theoretically) illegal in my language as well, yet they are used for purposes I mentioned.
And if we ever do, we must make sure to shut them afterwards.
Just America? Don't forget, it's your culture that's being shoved down the world's collective throat, so we're all getting "wussified". And as you said, it's not a good thing.
Asimov's robots are not computer-based. They are machines, but with structures very similar to brains. They are not initially programmed, their brains are structured and then programmed.
So their brain actually contains "burned-in" Laws, as structures. Only then they are programmed; and thus they cannot violate the laws. Any comparison involving implementing Laws as program code is invalid.
In real life, robot's behaviour is defined by programming at all stages, so the Laws, as envisioned by Asimov, cannot really be applied.
You forgot one detail.
Most Asimov's stories deal with problems arising from these laws. Asimov himself shows how these laws are inadequate or barely adequate. For example, in his Empire universe, robots, through temporal and dimensional manipulation wiped out all non-human life, and then wiped out themselves. In one story, robots manipulated the world economy ... "to benefit mankind". They weren't harming anyone.
I'm not very familiar with Asimov's literature, but you seem to be even less familiar by quoting these laws in this context.
Feeling lispic today?
I prefer Logo:
[Archive the archive [the archive [the archive [the archive]]]]
Or just:
TO ARCHIVE :x :x
OP ARCHIVE SE [Archive the]
END
And antivirus protection