Manoel Neto

Developers don't slap cheesy action-reaction AI on games nowadays due to lack of power. The real reason is that it's pretty hard to code good AI for something as complex as an action game.

I'd say doing "good" AI for games is far harder than doing academic AI, due to a major issue: there isn't a clear and obvious objective for game AI.

If you start coding an AI system for stitching multiple photos taken at random directions together to build a panoramic image, you want your AI to be as good and as precise as possible, and you can give it clear feedback for improvement.

But on games, "perfect" AI isn't desirable. If an enemy employs perfect tatics and aims perfectly, the game will become unplayable, and the AI will be labeled "bad".

Good AI for games is different than good AI for academic purposes. In games you want the AI to look good, enemies to react differently and avoid doing stupid things without sniping you from a kilometer away automatically. This dubious goal is incompatible with the AI being seriously researched, and thus lots of hack jobs are done.

While featuring relatively flat characters, the Golden Sun games (GBA) did an amazing job in presenting the villians.

The "villians" in Golden Sun have reasonable motives behind their acts (though they are only truly exposed in the 2nd game), and there is no truly evil mastermind in the whole story: the ongoing conflict steams from the different views regarding on how to deal with a problem which is affecting everyone.

The sad part is that in Brazil the prices are actually lower for richier people. Take a DS lite for example:

1) In a shopping mall (where anyone can walk into):
~320.0 USD

2) In auction sites (only for those who can use the internet):
~240.0 USD

3) Directly importing from the USA (only for those with international credit cards AND an internet connection):
~170.0 USD

Now the catch is: you need to meet a minimun income requirement before you can apply for an international CC.Not to mention the added knowledge one needs to get their imported goods without the 60% govt' extorsion.

Geeze, how weird is reading such news after just watching Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex all over again.

Did the man learn to read barcode yet?

While some postesd about this being old news, it's obvious they don't know how old this actually is.

I remember reading this "news" in a magazing in the early '90s ('92 or '93, can't remember now I was only a pre-teen back then).

So it seems someone found some of those 12+ years old golden gameboys while cleaning the storage room and decided to re-announce them...

There is some reasoning behind this exam, as ridiculous as it sounds to a gamer.

In these courses there's always the oddball person who signed in out just 'cause it sounded cool, but never ever touched or cared about games before. Or, to a lesser extent, never played on/cared about consoles or the PC.

Just like people who sign into TI courses and don't even know how to turn the computer on. I heard a lot of stories like that.

While more space is never bad, the argument "HD games needs HD media" is not that strong.

PC games have been running in "HD" for years and most recent games ask 1GB of RAM in their "recommneded" system requirements. The PS3 and 360 have half as much RAM, and a good chunk of that is eaten by the various buffers required for next-gen graphical wizardry.

The X360 version of Oblivion already displayed some underscaled textures when compared to the PC version running at the highest quality setting. And the PC version only requires 4.6GBs of HD space to install.

As much as a developer can master the target hardware, it cannot make it have more RAM than it has. So future X360 and PS3 games will only be able to boost texture resolution or variety through cleverly fitting more textures on the existing RAM via compression.

Of course, using HD FMV will eat lots of space, so Squenix would have trouble to fit all their awesome CG cutscenes on mere 9GBs, unlike the majority of developers who have long ago moved onto real-time cutscenes.

After playing games like Shadow of the Colossus, Metal Gear Solid 3 and Resident Evil 4 I would feel very cheated by watching pre-rendered cutscenes on consoles which are supposed to be 10 times as powerfull as the previous ones, high resolution or not.

Also, some small airport shops can be *very* outdated in regard to their stocks. In the case of games, if nobody buys a certain copy, it may stay there for years to come, and once in a while they'll put it on display to see if them can dump it on some unsuspecting traveler.

Well, this officially turns the PS3 into a proprietary computer, not a game console.

It's now looking more like the MSX, where you both could run arbitrary programs and code your own stuff and play proprietary games.

I have NEVER read such balatant BULLSHIT!

Next-gen features? For God's sake, I can name a whole bunch of Dreamcast, N64 and even some PSOne games which use many of the features there! They just created a lot of buzzwords for very TRIVIAL techniques. Maybe those are next-gen features to EA's internal monkeys, but not the rest of the world...

Momentum Shift: In any engine capable of blending animations/poses together, this is very trivial to implement by blending a "lean forward" pose op top of the running animation, adjusting the blend intensity based on the speed. They never played Shadow of the Colossus?

Procedural Awareness: Is that a joke? Rotating a character's head and eyes so it looks at some object? And having it's "AI" change the face animation depending on the object? How is that next-gen only? NPCs would look at me in Shenmue, Zelda OOT, Final Fantasy IX and a whole bunch of other games. I remember the characters looking at things automatically in Resident Evil 2 on the PSOne, but that might have been Code Veronica.

Foot Planting: ok, many developers are unaware of how to avoid the sliding issue. There are many ways to avoid that. If you don't want to mess with IK, there is a very, very simple way: just adjust the animation speed based on the ratio between the character velocity and a reference velocity for that animation. I've seen this in action and it looks good.

Responsiveness: *sigh*, did it took EA all these years to learn how to code smooth transitions between animations, and use transition poses?

Accurate Positioning: Is this a joke? Seriously, even Saturn games had characters who could turn into any direction. If they're talking about having a nice animation for rotating around, animation blending and transitioning can be used to get the same effect.

I though all these were commonplace already in EA (I haven't really played much EA games lately).