Free Candy For Everyone

By popular demand (well, one request), I’m writing up my notes on Richard Evans’ talk from AIIDE. Richard Evans is currently working at EA/Maxis on the Sims 3. He talked about how the work they’re doing to make each Sim unique and distinct. They’re goal is to make them more individual and more social at the same time.

They have a large pool of discrete traits. Each Sim gets a selection of about five from the pool of traits. Some traits are mutually exclusive, for example, a Sim can be modest or have a big ego. A Sim can hate TV or love TV.

They’re doing their work on the game mechanics in a 2D prototype. It’s a simple sprite world with box graphics, but the simulation it’s running is complete. Richard showed us several demos of the topics he was discussing in action. He had a Sim that hated TV and one that loved TV. It resulted in a funny setup where one Sim would turn on the TV and the other would promptly turn it off.

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My PC is dying. Today was possibly the beginning of the end. The poor thing has had problems for quite some time - the motherboard chipset fan is prone to failure. It’s given out once before, and when I called the manufacturer about getting a replacement they didn’t even pause to ask questions except “What’s your address?” They promptly shipped out a new fan and I was on my way.

Well, my fan started making wacky noises a few months ago and I realized it was about time to get another one. But I’ve been mostly using my MacBook, so I never got around to it. I only turn the PC on once every few weeks at this point. Well. That was true up until a few weeks ago when I met up with Soren Johnson at AIIDE.

Soren was the lead designer as well as the main gameplay and AI engineer on Civilization IV. We had a nice long chat at the conference and it got me wanting to dig up my copy of Civ IV. I hadn’t really played it significantly when it first came up because I was in the depths of my WoW addiction. I managed to pause WoW long enough to play a few games of Civ through (and even write up a review and some more thoughts and then even more thoughts).

I’m no longer really playing WoW (yup, still WoW free. I think I’ve played once in the last 2 months) so I’m free for other games! I added a feature to the sidebar where I show what I’m playing, in fact. Civilization has been tops of that list for the last few weeks. Re-reading my initial thoughts, I don’t disagree much with my early assessment. I do think that my initial impressions of each new Civ game are always negative. “Why’d they change this? Where’s this favorite feature of mine??” Then I go away and come back to it and fall in love. It happened that way for me on Civ III and even Alpha Centauri. So my return to Civ IV has lead me to forgive it for some of the things that are different (though I still want my bullet point list from my more thoughts post implemented!).

Back to the stated topic though. I still don’t have Windows on my MacBook and I only have the Windows version of Civ IV so I’m forced to boot up my PC to play Civ. This means instead of only being turned on once every few weeks it’s been on several times a week. I was playing Civ on it last night, in fact, and it was a-ok.

Tonight I turned it on and got to the Windows loading screen with the little bar that bounces back and forth. I waited and waited. Then waited some more. Eventually the bar stopped bouncing but Windows never loaded. I rebooted and managed to load into Windows Safe Mode. “Now what?” I thought to myself. I uninstalled some stuff and removed everything from my Startup folder but to no avail. It still won’t run in un-safe mode.

Don’t really know how this could have anything to do with my failing fan, but maybe my computer overheated from the strenuous Civ workout and that caused unhappiness in the hard drive. Or somewhere else, who knows? I’m a software gal, hardware is strange and mysterious.

I’m not freaking out as much as I might expect. Probably because I love my MacBook Pro. But seriously, I need to do something about my PC. Troubleshooting tips, anyone?

It’s been taking me a bit longer than planned to get around to writing up my notes from AIIDE. I’ll just list out who spoke and see if I can’t get around to filling in the ones people are most interested in hearing about. So leave a comment if you want to know what someone talked about! And probably do it soon before I forget everything I heard. Hehe. Kidding! I took notes!

Wednesday:

• Richard Evans from EA/Maxis talking about Sims 3
• Quinn Dunki from Pandemic talking about pathfinding in Saboteur
• Chris Williams, Nick Pavis, Matthew Best and Steve Dykes talking about Euphoria technology from LucasArts (I won’t write this one up since it’s where I work! Conflict of interest and all)
• Ken Perlin talking about all sorts of interesting stuff

Thursday:

• Matthew Wiggins from Lionhead talking about character and emotion in Fable 2
• Wolff Dobson from AiLive talking about their LiveMove and LiveCombat products
• Peter Gorniak from Mad Doc Software talking about Squad planning in a tactical shooter (yes, I used to work at Mad Doc, but I’ll talk about this one if people are curious)
• Chris Hecker from EA/Maxis talking about approaching hard problems - not really about Spore

Friday:

• Neil Young from EALA talking about various AI in different games, including the Spielberg titles
• Soren Johnson talking about Civilization IV (he was at Firaxis but is now at EA/Maxis)

Just about all my notes are from invited talks. The only one I could really write up that was from a paper submission is Peter’s talk, above. I have a few notes on some work done at the University of Alberta on memory efficient pathfinding that is being used in Bioware’s Dragon Age, but the most interesting thing about my notes is really the fact that the game is still in development, since there’s been nothing about it released in quite some time.

The final item at the conference was a presentation about this annual RTS competition. If you’re interested in RTS AI problems then I recommend checking out their webpage since it’s all open source and you can download their engine and all the competitors to try to build your own solution.

As I mentioned before, I was at an AI conference last week. The conference was a mix of invited talks by industry people and academic paper presentations. It didn’t quite gel into one unified experience, however.

The audience was split maybe 75% academics (professors and PhD students), 25% game industry folk. The two groups have very different agendas about what they want out of such a conference. For me, there are two kinds of talks that I hope to hear. The first is a GDC-style talk. These are talks where the draw is either a talk about a game that is exciting or the speaker is renowned for past/current projects and we go just to hear what they have to say, even if it’s not strictly relevant. An example of the former would be me going to see any and all talks about Guitar Hero at GDC. An example of the latter would be going to see anything Will Wright is talking about, whether it’s Spore or Astrobiology.

The second kind of talk I’m looking for is a clear explanation of applicable algorithms or techniques which I can actually walk away and implement into my game. I don’t have really any good examples of this one. They don’t really happen. And this is what I keep hoping AIIDE will be, but it’s not quite there yet.

This is the 3rd year of the conference, so it’s still fledging. It’s quite small in comparison to a show like GDC, with only around 100 attendees. I missed last year, but made it the first year. This year was better than the first, in my opinion, because they had a ton more people speaking from industry than the first year. Admittedly, they were almost all invited talks rather than paper submissions, but that’s ok in my mind. Well, the first year they had Will Wright, but I don’t think one Will Wright can compare to all the speakers we had this year. I’ll hopefully get around to talking about the actual speakers and what they had to say in specific later this week.

As to the academic community, my impression was that a lot of them view this as yet another opportunity to get published, which is of paramount importance to them. AIIDE is funded in part by AAAI and papers are published through them, so it’s a pretty respectable AI publication, I guess. Hey, I’m published now, as a result of getting a paper accepted to last year’s conference. But that doesn’t matter too much to my career, unlike those in academia. Well, maybe I’ll find a way to post my article at some point, not sure where my soft-copy of that thing went anyways. But I digress.
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I’m off to an AI conference for the rest of the week. I’ll be attending AIIDE - Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment. That’s a mouthful, huh? It’s pretty directly applicable to my job, or so I hope, since I work on Artificial Intelligence for Interactive Digital Entertainment and all that jazz (games, I mean!). I went to the first one of these conferences a couple years back and there was a lot to take in. This time it’s local to me, so it seems a bit more low key.

If anything happens of great excitement while I’m there, I’ll be sure to share it.