Matt

i wants a teevee too....

The comments here at the Haus are beyond brain-dead; they're virulently infectious, TCP-transmitted brain pathogens.

The money better be good, Shoals, that's all I can say.

Reading the article, only the last paragraph makes dire predictions about conformity.

The rest of it is a well-researched investigation into what benefit the skill of mastering systems has in the real world.

He also quotes Ralph Koster as saying that the goal of a game is to "become boring", which is freaking hilarious - he's like simultaneously incompetent and frustrated!

Josh: As an animator, do you want to have to animate every little facial feature during, say, a cutscene?

No, you want to animate the character's kung-fu moves and walk cycle.

While his research about feet and hands would be worth looking at for you, I don't think you have much to fear from his procedural emotion work. It just means that as an animator you get to spend time working on the parts of the character that need it, and you can leave things like changing emotion to code.

Not to mention, *somebody* has to set up all the default emotion poses and the rules for how they relate. What Perlin describes isn't so much absolute rules for a human face, but a way in which the elements interact to create believable human motion. Just like rigging a skeleton or setting up blend shapes, an artist will need to define those elements in any real-world application.

Just like higher-level languages make a programmer's life easier, the only thing this research is going to do for animators is make their lives easier. With the increasing scope of games, it's not only convenient, it's neccesary.

Comments like this are stupid, because they assume a fixed set of techniques.

Any idiot can push enough data to make an xbox 360 or ps3 or home pc stutter. The goal is to avoid having to do so, and one does that by managing the available resources in a smarter way.

The guy in the article doesn't know what he's talking about, plain and simple.

The problem of decent AI is as simple as cost. It costs too much for decent AI. Computation that could go to graphics or physics or other whiz-bang features is neccesary to do AI of this order. Let's say that you could either have wii-level graphics with this type of AI, or crappy AI with whiz-bang specular lighting and whatnot. 9 times out of 10, the audience (nerds) and the investors will say, "pump up the graphics, fake AI is good enough."

Offloading that cost to a dedicated processor doesn't change the fact that the cost is there, and at this point, it's not a cost that the gaming market is ready to pay.

That's not a "risk worth taking". In a "stagnant industry", it's a *neccesity*.

Ahh, I love it when idiots confuse correlation with causality.

Look! Gas prices have risen like 300% over the same period! We've had 12 years of Republican control in Congress since then! I, personally, have gained 19 years of age since 1987! What's this world coming to?

Coding isn't the difficulty; it only really takes a few good coders to make an engine like in Project Offset. The problem is art, and gameplay code. Art takes time; Offset didn't look to have a whole lot of environments or characters, and there wasn't really gameplay to speak of.

That's of course fine; the Offset guys are running things on a skeleton crew until they can ramp up funding and get the staff they need to compete.

But make no mistake; in order to make a competitive, engaging first-person title, they'll need a fair number of people just to set up encounters in the levels.