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StarCraft AI at Super Happy Dev House

By Ben Weber | Published: January 24, 2010

I attended Super Happy Dev House 36 and presented a lightening talk about the upcoming AIIDE 2010 StarCraft AI Competition. The competition is interesting to the hacker community at Super Happy Dev House, because the Broodwar API enabling the competition is a reverse engineering project providing direct access to game state and units in StarCraft. There are several projects built on top of the Broodwar API which enable developers to write StarCraft AI in a variety of languages including Java, Python, LUA and C#.

In the presentation, I discuss the motivation leading up to the StarCraft AI Competition and the technology enabling it. Follow the competition at EIS,  Google Code, YouTube, Twitter and Slashdot.

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Designer Intent vs Emergence: Nissan Edition

By Chris Lewis | Published: January 4, 2010

Nissan Datsun 510: Fastest Car on the Planet

Forza Motorsport 3 is, as described by one of the designers, “car porn.” And, well, that beauty above? That delicious, glistening, throbbing piece of machinery? That’s a Nissan Datsun 510 from 1970. You’re free to take a moment right now, if you need one… imagining yourself astride the seat, hand gripped on the gear shift, thrusting forwards through the forest…

At least, that’s what Forza 3 would have you think.

Once you’re back from your “moment,” please continue over the jump to see exactly what I’m talking about.

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Uncharted 2‘s Sloppy Fiction

By Noah Wardrip-Fruin | Published: December 30, 2009
Uncharted 2

The design of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves should make integrating gameplay and fiction easier in two particular ways. First, it’s linear, so there’s no need to worry about unexpected traversals of the fictional space. Second, it’s almost entirely scripted — a matter of how adeptly things are accomplished, rather than what approach is taken or what tasks are attempted — so there’s little chance of unexpected emergence from game mechanics coming into play in places, times, or combinations other than what the developer intended. Given these advantages/limitations, the game’s creators shouldn’t have much trouble making sure that gameplay action is solidly motivated by, situated in, and consistent with the fictional world.

And it appears to have worked, at least from the game’s reception. As you probably know, the game has been getting great reviews that call it “a rollicking good yarn” that “gives up nothing to the biggest action films you can think of.”

I’ve just started playing myself — thanks to winter break — but I’m actually a bit disappointed in Uncharted 2. It seems as though the gameplay and fiction have more disjuncture than even in the first Uncharted, much less a well-written movie. Read More »

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Digital Pioneers of Computer Art

By Jim Whitehead | Published: December 18, 2009
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Lloyd Sumner, 1970, color plotter print

I recently visited the Digital Pioneers exhibit of early computer art at the Victoria and Albert museum in London. The exhibit shows off the V&A collection of computer art, and includes several items acquired from the Computer Arts Society archives.
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Richard Evans Talk at UCSC

By Gillian Smith | Published: December 2, 2009
Richard Evans

Richard Evans

Richard Evans, Electronic Arts

Date: Friday, December 4th
Time: 11:00am – 12:30pm
Location: Engineering 2 – 180 (Simularium)
Hosted By: Professor Marilyn Walker, Dept. of Computer Science

“People Simulations”

Richard Evans is the Senior AI Engineer for The Sims 3 at EA/Maxis, and has previously won awards for his role in developing the AI for Black & White.

In this talk, he will demo three examples of people simulations: Sims 3, Sim Philosophers (a simulation of philosophical debate), and Sim Diary (a model of text generation based on personality traits). He will focus on what these simulations have in common: a model of social understanding combined with a model of individual personality.

This lecture is free and open to the public, but visitors should purchase a parking pass from the visitor kiosk at the main entrance. They will also provide a map showing the best parking for Engineering 2.

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Procedural Content Generation Workshop

By Jim Whitehead | Published: December 2, 2009

I’m pleased to announce that the Call for Papers for the Workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Computer Games is now available. The PC Games workshop is co-located with FDG 2010 this coming June in Monterey, California. Deadline for submissions is February 24, 2010.

From the website:

As computer games increasingly take place inside large, complex worlds, the cost of manually creating these worlds is spiraling upwards. Procedural content generation, where a computer algorithm produces computationally generated levels, art assets, quests, background history, stories, characters, and weapons, offers hope for substantially reducing the authoring burden in games. Procedural content generation has multiple benefits beyond reducing authoring cost. With rich procedural generation, a single person becomes capable of creating games that now require teams to create, thus making individual artistic expression easier to achieve. Automated content generation can take player history as one of its inputs, and thereby create games that adapt to individual players. Sufficiently rich content generation algorithms can create novel game elements, thereby discovering new game potentials. Finally, the procedural generation algorithm itself acts as an executable model of one aspect of the game, thereby improving our theoretical understanding of game design.

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