My roommate could (and did) sleep through ANYTHING. So I suppose my solution to the problem is to shop for roommates until you find one for whom such kludges are unnecessary:)
I think the reason that they're better known for Magic is that they, well, created it (while the success of Magic basically assured their own success), while they bought TSR and, by extension, Dungeons and Dragons. This isn't to say that 3rd Edition isn't a hell of a lot more streamlined than 2nd (I know I enjoy playing it), but given that WotC opted to preserve the TSR brand, their relation to DnD in my mind is more marketshare than mindshare; I know I don't immediately associate them with it.
is Poki Poker Online. There aren't that many rooms, but the interface Java applet is clean and compatible with Linux, OSX, and Win9x if you've got the right runtime package. The bots are quite competitive, and the playerbase fairly forthcoming with advice and commentary on precisely how bad your strategies, or lack thereof, are.
Mittens don't lower your core temperature; they merely slow the rate of heat exchange between your hands and the environment. Your hands tend to be colder than your core on cold days because the body is conserving heat, keeping your core temperature up (or at least staving off its fall, depending on how bundled up you are) by reducing blood flow to your hands and feet. These gloves warm your hands at the expense of core temp, presumably resulting in further cuts to blood flow to the extremities.
I think that the fact that mittens trump gloves (at the expense of dexterity, of course), provided both are made from the same material, is that mittens have a smaller exposed surface area than gloves and thus less room for heat exchange to occur.
Admittedly, these are the DOS ports (...or rather aren't the Atari ports, I haven't the foggiest idea which version was first), so the nostalgia might not be perfect. Running them shouldn't be a problem for DOSBox. Home of the Underdogs is a beautiful thing:)
I, as I mentioned, was using the non-USB Gamepad Pro...black controller, four main buttons and what I thought were two other configurable buttons but turned out to be simply autofire for buttons one and two. Completely unconfigurable, in fact...no bundled software or anything, which is odd given the fact that my original Gravis Gamepad at least came with a small sampler floppy with, like, Commander Keen on it:). I assure you that my complaints come not from an error in thumb placement but from no effort at all on my part, in fact; with absolutely no contact between my hand and the controller, it would intermittently output "right" signals. No lie. The damn thing just wouldn't center, let alone stop moving. Might've been a freak accident, sure, but it sure was an ornery bastard of a gamepad...
The original Gravis Gamepad, as well as the Pro (at least the non-USB one, I haven't bought anoyhrt since I picked up that clunker), are ridiculously finicky controllers, at least in my experience under Win2k). Even after adjusting the size of the dead zone and such, calibrating it was a nightmare. It had a nasty tendency to assume I had some sort of perverse obsession with intermittently moving to the right. Ugh, terrific headache. I wouldn't bother with anything but a USB controller nowadays, and would be at least a little wary of Gravis' stuff anyway:)
Now this , the Airflow PC gamepad, looks a little more up my alley...really nice grip, good response on the D-pad. I can't speak for its performance, as I've yet to pick one up, but of all the display units set out at Best Buy, this was by far the most impressive-feeling. And, uh, it's got a fan in it to keep your hands cool and dry, which sounds fun, though not particularly useful. I'd check one out if you can find it out on display.
I'd have the information propagate according to some set of the following criteria:
1) Whether the agent in question has seen the behavior's effectiveness (necessitating a crowded room, a narrow escape or, yes, a telephone. I imagine that one might bump into ridiculously elite commandos that are in constant radio contact, for example)
2) "Ingenuity factor" - whether the agent is apt to pick up on such things and develop effective responses (how quick on the uptake are they? Some folks might never understand how you do what you do, regardless of how many times they see you hit enemies in the legs to stun them before finishing them off and how many warnings they receive from their compatriots about it. Furthermore, some folks might never figure out an effective counter to your tactics, or, if they do, might not have the time or resources to implement it. Not everyone has access to kevlar long-johns, and even those that do might not be able to get them in time to protect themselves from the action hero about to break down the door)
3) Whether the agent is talkative (percentage score from zero to one, adjusted by faction interrelationships...how much does group A care about the fate of group B?)
4) Whether the potential receivers are receptive, and how adaptable they are (ditto, again adjusted by faction interrelationships, maybe by rank as well...a good leader is far more likely to get his subordinates to do something than a grunt is to do the opposite)
5) Whether or not there's a language barrier, if you happen to be that sadistic
Of course I don't think the full set of rules would be appropriate for most games. The Max Payne series, for example, is a little too arcade-oriented for AI this involved. I think the propagative ideas would only work in a game with massive scope, like some tactical mix between Deus Ex 2 and Vice City...which is _hellish_ to think about design-wise:). I've never seen a game that huge with combat that sophisticated.
The other major problem remains how one goes about designing AIs that can adapt. How does one break down player behaviors into discrete parts that can be assigned weight and identified as significant, and thus as candidates for adaptive behavior? I imagine some variant of the VF4: Evo body region tracking could be implemented, assembling a profile of what goes into a kill and a loss (escape, I guess, in this case): method of attack (weapon) and area damaged. "Mmm," says a reasonably smart AI. "75% of the kills I've seen him are resulting from headshots, which account for 90% of the damage he's incurring in those cases. People he fails to hit in the head, however, tend to escape. I'll be sure to keep myself better covered in the future," potentially reducing accuracy ("No way I'm peeking my head out!") but potentially increasing survivability in the long run, and in any case forcing the player to adjust his tactics.
I know this is probably a recipe for neural net hell, and the fact that firefights are usually really chaotic and over very quickly makes the idea of a lucidly observant enemy kind of silly (though it would be a lot of fun, I think, to code a text-based proof of concept), but I do think this sort of social AI, or whatever you want to call it has a place in at least *some* genre. So FPS behaviors are hard to break down. It might do well in an RPG, for example, in which spell slots are few (that is to say, not at all like the Final Fantasy games, in which nearly every spell tends to be at your disposal all the time), and as such the choice of defensive spells and counterspells to prepare before battle is a fine art. After a few months of adventuring, perhaps news spreads among the Orc tribes that a human wizard that wields fire has been cutting a swath through the settlements near human lands. Their mages, however few, might begin to research anti-fire spells just in case, and deploy duly equipped mages and magic items near the border zone in order to conta
The "adaptive AI" in Max Payne was simply a dynamic difficulty slider. I wouldn't be surprised if it was simply a matter of monitoring your kill rate, perhaps adjusted by your injury rate, and increasing enemy effectiveness (fire rate, accuracy, maybe damage multiplier if they really wanted to be devious) accordingly. I imagine the AI topped out fairly low, though, so the overall effect was negligible. I don't believe it was adaptive in the sense that it dynamically adjusted its battle tactics according to your battle tactics, as opposed to simple numerical effectiveness.
Say I tend to shootjump to the right when I head into battle. The AI couldn't care less. Now if it _did_ notice that enemies tended to die more often when I did so, and cause them to proactively fire where I would, statistically speaking, very likely end up, that'd be an AI to write home about.
The most remarkable AI in modern gaming that I've encountered of late is that of Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution (a bargain at $20 new, btw), in which battle profiles of players in the Japanese arcade circuits was distilled into what prove to be fairly different AIs. Dynamically speaking, the game tracks the areas that you tend to attack successfully (high, middle, or low), whether those attacks are strikes or throws, and whether you won or lost with those percentages...and, judging from its effectiveness at smushing me in the long run, adjusts its behavior accordingly. So while a given AI profile might tend to, say, try to counter middle throws often, that tendency might be further exaggerated as the bulk of my throws tend to come from that area.
Quite impressive not only for its dynamism but also for the wide and finely graded range of difficulty among the AIs. As you gain ranks in the Quest mode (from 1st kyu to 10th, 10th dan to 1st, and beyond), your opponents very slowly become more difficult such that you can actually observe effective tactics emerging and adjust your _own_ behavior accordingly. Quite a far cry from Street Fighter II, mm?
While I do like poetry and such, I'm getting a uncomfortably Vogon vibe from this guy's stuff. For the unwashed heathens among us, the following is taken from Douglas Adams' _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_:
Oh freddled gruntbuggly
Thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee.
Groop I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes
And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles,
Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon,
See if I don't!
Honestly, if you, in the spirit of semirandom recombination that seems to characterize a good deal of Glazier's work, take the nonsense words and add in random techno-jargon, you'd get a very Glazier-y and equally unsatisfying verse. Jargon-wielding for what appears to be its own sake doesn't make for nerd-digestible poetry. So yes, while I applaud the experimental nature of some of his stuff, I don't much like it.
But the Enterprise isn't designed to enter an atmosphere??
Very true! However one could argue that this test was a simulation of the flight of the Enterprise where the Mach number of the flow is analogous to the Warp speed of the vehicle.
...yes, and one could also argue that simulating speeds of, say, 5 miles per hour would also be "analogous" to the craft's speed. Pick any number between 1 and 10, a unit of distance, and your favorite time interval, and poof! Instant, completely specious analogy!
"So you're five years old, son? Well, I'm five foot five! Isn't that, um, coincidental and irrelevant?"
Could we please refrain from plagiarizing titles? Admittedly this is not as bad as ripping article summaries, but still doesn't sit right.
Very neat picture in any case.
Slashdot Mirror
My roommate could (and did) sleep through ANYTHING. So I suppose my solution to the problem is to shop for roommates until you find one for whom such kludges are unnecessary :)
I think the reason that they're better known for Magic is that they, well, created it (while the success of Magic basically assured their own success), while they bought TSR and, by extension, Dungeons and Dragons. This isn't to say that 3rd Edition isn't a hell of a lot more streamlined than 2nd (I know I enjoy playing it), but given that WotC opted to preserve the TSR brand, their relation to DnD in my mind is more marketshare than mindshare; I know I don't immediately associate them with it.
Perhaps it wasn't included because it's not an RTS?
Karaoke Revolution, you mean :)
is Poki Poker Online. There aren't that many rooms, but the interface Java applet is clean and compatible with Linux, OSX, and Win9x if you've got the right runtime package. The bots are quite competitive, and the playerbase fairly forthcoming with advice and commentary on precisely how bad your strategies, or lack thereof, are.
Am I the only one who misread that as Janet Reno? Whew!
The Lynx port of Xenophobe was quite good. I think it holds up favorably after -- eep! -- 14 years. I feel old now :)
Emulator can be found here, and a system BIOS here.
Mittens don't lower your core temperature; they merely slow the rate of heat exchange between your hands and the environment. Your hands tend to be colder than your core on cold days because the body is conserving heat, keeping your core temperature up (or at least staving off its fall, depending on how bundled up you are) by reducing blood flow to your hands and feet. These gloves warm your hands at the expense of core temp, presumably resulting in further cuts to blood flow to the extremities.
I think that the fact that mittens trump gloves (at the expense of dexterity, of course), provided both are made from the same material, is that mittens have a smaller exposed surface area than gloves and thus less room for heat exchange to occur.
See?
Universe 1
:)
Universe 2
Universe 3
Admittedly, these are the DOS ports (...or rather aren't the Atari ports, I haven't the foggiest idea which version was first), so the nostalgia might not be perfect. Running them shouldn't be a problem for DOSBox. Home of the Underdogs is a beautiful thing
I, as I mentioned, was using the non-USB Gamepad Pro...black controller, four main buttons and what I thought were two other configurable buttons but turned out to be simply autofire for buttons one and two. Completely unconfigurable, in fact...no bundled software or anything, which is odd given the fact that my original Gravis Gamepad at least came with a small sampler floppy with, like, Commander Keen on it :). I assure you that my complaints come not from an error in thumb placement but from no effort at all on my part, in fact; with absolutely no contact between my hand and the controller, it would intermittently output "right" signals. No lie. The damn thing just wouldn't center, let alone stop moving. Might've been a freak accident, sure, but it sure was an ornery bastard of a gamepad...
And yes, gamepad configurability does rock.
The original Gravis Gamepad, as well as the Pro (at least the non-USB one, I haven't bought anoyhrt since I picked up that clunker), are ridiculously finicky controllers, at least in my experience under Win2k). Even after adjusting the size of the dead zone and such, calibrating it was a nightmare. It had a nasty tendency to assume I had some sort of perverse obsession with intermittently moving to the right. Ugh, terrific headache. I wouldn't bother with anything but a USB controller nowadays, and would be at least a little wary of Gravis' stuff anyway :)
Now this , the Airflow PC gamepad, looks a little more up my alley...really nice grip, good response on the D-pad. I can't speak for its performance, as I've yet to pick one up, but of all the display units set out at Best Buy, this was by far the most impressive-feeling. And, uh, it's got a fan in it to keep your hands cool and dry, which sounds fun, though not particularly useful. I'd check one out if you can find it out on display.
I'd have the information propagate according to some set of the following criteria:
:). I've never seen a game that huge with combat that sophisticated.
1) Whether the agent in question has seen the behavior's effectiveness (necessitating a crowded room, a narrow escape or, yes, a telephone. I imagine that one might bump into ridiculously elite commandos that are in constant radio contact, for example)
2) "Ingenuity factor" - whether the agent is apt to pick up on such things and develop effective responses (how quick on the uptake are they? Some folks might never understand how you do what you do, regardless of how many times they see you hit enemies in the legs to stun them before finishing them off and how many warnings they receive from their compatriots about it. Furthermore, some folks might never figure out an effective counter to your tactics, or, if they do, might not have the time or resources to implement it. Not everyone has access to kevlar long-johns, and even those that do might not be able to get them in time to protect themselves from the action hero about to break down the door)
3) Whether the agent is talkative (percentage score from zero to one, adjusted by faction interrelationships...how much does group A care about the fate of group B?)
4) Whether the potential receivers are receptive, and how adaptable they are (ditto, again adjusted by faction interrelationships, maybe by rank as well...a good leader is far more likely to get his subordinates to do something than a grunt is to do the opposite)
5) Whether or not there's a language barrier, if you happen to be that sadistic
Of course I don't think the full set of rules would be appropriate for most games. The Max Payne series, for example, is a little too arcade-oriented for AI this involved. I think the propagative ideas would only work in a game with massive scope, like some tactical mix between Deus Ex 2 and Vice City...which is _hellish_ to think about design-wise
The other major problem remains how one goes about designing AIs that can adapt. How does one break down player behaviors into discrete parts that can be assigned weight and identified as significant, and thus as candidates for adaptive behavior? I imagine some variant of the VF4: Evo body region tracking could be implemented, assembling a profile of what goes into a kill and a loss (escape, I guess, in this case): method of attack (weapon) and area damaged. "Mmm," says a reasonably smart AI. "75% of the kills I've seen him are resulting from headshots, which account for 90% of the damage he's incurring in those cases. People he fails to hit in the head, however, tend to escape. I'll be sure to keep myself better covered in the future," potentially reducing accuracy ("No way I'm peeking my head out!") but potentially increasing survivability in the long run, and in any case forcing the player to adjust his tactics.
I know this is probably a recipe for neural net hell, and the fact that firefights are usually really chaotic and over very quickly makes the idea of a lucidly observant enemy kind of silly (though it would be a lot of fun, I think, to code a text-based proof of concept), but I do think this sort of social AI, or whatever you want to call it has a place in at least *some* genre. So FPS behaviors are hard to break down. It might do well in an RPG, for example, in which spell slots are few (that is to say, not at all like the Final Fantasy games, in which nearly every spell tends to be at your disposal all the time), and as such the choice of defensive spells and counterspells to prepare before battle is a fine art. After a few months of adventuring, perhaps news spreads among the Orc tribes that a human wizard that wields fire has been cutting a swath through the settlements near human lands. Their mages, however few, might begin to research anti-fire spells just in case, and deploy duly equipped mages and magic items near the border zone in order to conta
Whoops, got the polarity wrong. It's been a little while since I've picked it up :)
The "adaptive AI" in Max Payne was simply a dynamic difficulty slider. I wouldn't be surprised if it was simply a matter of monitoring your kill rate, perhaps adjusted by your injury rate, and increasing enemy effectiveness (fire rate, accuracy, maybe damage multiplier if they really wanted to be devious) accordingly. I imagine the AI topped out fairly low, though, so the overall effect was negligible. I don't believe it was adaptive in the sense that it dynamically adjusted its battle tactics according to your battle tactics, as opposed to simple numerical effectiveness.
Say I tend to shootjump to the right when I head into battle. The AI couldn't care less. Now if it _did_ notice that enemies tended to die more often when I did so, and cause them to proactively fire where I would, statistically speaking, very likely end up, that'd be an AI to write home about.
The most remarkable AI in modern gaming that I've encountered of late is that of Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution (a bargain at $20 new, btw), in which battle profiles of players in the Japanese arcade circuits was distilled into what prove to be fairly different AIs. Dynamically speaking, the game tracks the areas that you tend to attack successfully (high, middle, or low), whether those attacks are strikes or throws, and whether you won or lost with those percentages...and, judging from its effectiveness at smushing me in the long run, adjusts its behavior accordingly. So while a given AI profile might tend to, say, try to counter middle throws often, that tendency might be further exaggerated as the bulk of my throws tend to come from that area.
Quite impressive not only for its dynamism but also for the wide and finely graded range of difficulty among the AIs. As you gain ranks in the Quest mode (from 1st kyu to 10th, 10th dan to 1st, and beyond), your opponents very slowly become more difficult such that you can actually observe effective tactics emerging and adjust your _own_ behavior accordingly. Quite a far cry from Street Fighter II, mm?
Sweet!
Heh...my Livejournal nick is neologue ^_^
While I do like poetry and such, I'm getting a uncomfortably Vogon vibe from this guy's stuff. For the unwashed heathens among us, the following is taken from Douglas Adams' _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_:
Oh freddled gruntbuggly
Thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee.
Groop I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes
And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles,
Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon,
See if I don't!
Honestly, if you, in the spirit of semirandom recombination that seems to characterize a good deal of Glazier's work, take the nonsense words and add in random techno-jargon, you'd get a very Glazier-y and equally unsatisfying verse. Jargon-wielding for what appears to be its own sake doesn't make for nerd-digestible poetry. So yes, while I applaud the experimental nature of some of his stuff, I don't much like it.
So your evaluation is "only you can evaluate it?" My enjoyment of the book will be proportional to my enjoyment of the book! Thanks!
From the page:
...yes, and one could also argue that simulating speeds of, say, 5 miles per hour would also be "analogous" to the craft's speed. Pick any number between 1 and 10, a unit of distance, and your favorite time interval, and poof! Instant, completely specious analogy!
But the Enterprise isn't designed to enter an atmosphere??
Very true! However one could argue that this test was a simulation of the flight of the Enterprise where the Mach number of the flow is analogous to the Warp speed of the vehicle.
"So you're five years old, son? Well, I'm five foot five! Isn't that, um, coincidental and irrelevant?"
You do mean pineal fluid, don't you?
This article has absolutely nothing to do with identity theft...
Two words? You just took one word and repeated it!
...thus making two words. I didn't say "two unique words," after all.
This semantic disagreement has helped me realize five words: I got axe for you.
Now there's a good reason to get out there and buy it: these quotes are getting very, very old.
Could we please refrain from plagiarizing titles? Admittedly this is not as bad as ripping article summaries, but still doesn't sit right. Very neat picture in any case.
Two words: zug zug.