A blog doesn’t really work for me. I always feel obliged to write some elaborated, polished article, when all I want to to dump some quick thoughts. Perhaps a wiki works better – time will tell…

So here it is: The Wiki. Note that this is not an open wiki; edit privileges are reserved to your humble host. In the unlikely case that you want to keep up with my updates, you can subscribe to the Recent Changes feed. It’ll be noisier than the usual blog feed, and its delta format needs a bit getting-used-to.

This blog will live on for the occasional ‘meta’ news, like this one.

My dear readership probably noticed that I made a few “Links YYYY-MM-DD” entries, featuring stuff on the web that I read or just thought to be useful or interesting. I do read a lot (I have about one hour commute time every day and a phone that it good enough to read feeds and websites), but manually preparing these entries proved to be way to much work for a lazy person as your humble host. So I just started to “share” these links in Google Reader and in the unlikely event that you care about this, you can find and subscribe to them at http://www.google.com/reader/shared/odahoda.

Of course I do not think that I can scale that thing up to create an AI that is smart enough to be a sufficient simulation of a human mind or just a NPC’s mind. More like a “decision engine” that tells what to do next based on some input, not unlike more traditional, rule based systems. But I have the faint hope that it could be more flexible and yield more natural results. Perhaps it could also be more resistant against deadlocks and infinite loops. Also I do not intend to use it for ultra complex subjects like dialogs (at least not right now, perhaps when I’m old and gray). I think the approach can be used in more abstract scenarios like building and populating towns. Well, we’ll see.

And for those who have no idea what I’m talking about, either read the book or wait until I write more about it.

Writing software has been the most entertaining occupation for me since I started dabbling with computers. Creating games was always high on the list, although there was always some other stuff on it as well, like math software, web content management and server administration systems. The list of software I actually published is very limited though.

I am not and never was a professional game developer. But I did stick my nose into that area and at some time even seriously considered getting a job in this industry.

I am not a hardcore gamer – but I must admit that we just recently bought a new computer for the sole purpose of playing recent games. I do enjoy playing games, mostly role playing games. So this site is about topics originating from this genre.

I do know what it takes to develop a serious software project. At my day job I have to deal with some really freaking huge systems – I can’t give you any numbers, but that’s for your own good, because they would simply blow your head away. And another significant part of that knowledge comes from trying and failing as well.

My time to pursue projects outside of my day job is very limited. The job is quite demanding (but fun) and I got family, so the opportunities for mindless hacking sessions are rather small.

I suck at blogging and my personal website is horribly out of data at the time of writing this.

Building a real game take of course lots of work. Don’t ask me how many person-hours (which I don’t have) are involved, let alone the specialized skills (which I don’t have) required for each sub-task. So I won’t even try to do it. Instead I just pick some semi-random topics which look sexy to me and explore them. Write down some thoughts, perhaps even create some code around it. But I consider this whole thing as a “research project,” there is no product at the end of the tunnel, it is an open ended journey and it will take me where ever it leads me.

My main interest is on the technical side, I can hardly claim to be a skilled game designer or artist. So the questions that I might ask myself look more like “How would I design [insert subsystem here]?” or “How should [insert problem here] be solved?” Although I probably won’t have the time to dive deep into coding.

Possible areas of interest

…that jump to my mind right now.

Each one of those might turn out to be already well covered, completely over my head or technically impossible in the foreseeable future, and there might be nothing I could add to it. Also my knowledge of the current state-of-the-art is very limited (I just recently started playing current games again), so some stuff might turn out as “but we’re already doing that.” I simply haven’t done any research yet. Being a braindump for that kind of research is the whole purpose of this site.

Dynamic dialog system

Use speech synthesis instead of prerecorded text. Increases the possibilities of the character’s AI at the expense of less expressive voices. This would involve programmatic generation of text, having some model of the language and modeling the state/emotions of a character so it can influence the way they express themselves.

Procedural story telling

Script based story systems have various limitations, especially in an open game universe. A player may complete tasks in unexpected order, get stuck on sub-tasks or choose unplanned actions. Or stuff like “Rescue the princess now, that’s the only hope for the empire!” And then you walk away for a week of looting dungeons and leveling up, just to find the princess still waiting for you and you rescue her dramatically in the last second before she’s sacrificed on the altar. A “super AI” which governs the game, lays out the story plot and constantly adjusts it to the current state of the universe and the players actions seems to the next step in the evolution.

Highly detailed game universe

The capitol of a big country that consists of a palace, cathedral and two hands full of shops and houses? All inhabited but a two digit number of people whose primary occupation seems to be walking on the street, sitting in a tavern or standing at the city gate 24/7, waiting for you to talk to them? Does not feel very realistic. What would it take to create (and run) a universe of the size of a real world continent (or bigger), with hundreds of cities, towns and villages? And hundreds of thousands people roaming that world, each one having a real live? That is something that cannot be handcrafted, but has to be generated algorithmically.

Building a motion capture system

I guess (that’s a pure guess) that motion capture systems are highly expensive, proprietary systems which are provided by specialized companies. Trying to build such a system with consumer grade hardware and open software would be an interesting challenge.