supersonic feet

Waaay back when, I was on the lookout for the next decent FPS to play on the PC and came across S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl.

The graphics were stunning and the gameplay looked really interesting. I pre-ordered the game on Play on the basis that the game would be out later in the year.

That was the 18th March, 2004 and the game still hasn’t been released. Having briefly worked on a computer game dev team (for BREED), I know games get delayed (and any gamer will know of the Duke Nukem (taking) Forever debacle), but 3 years delayed?

Anyway, to the point of this post: I left the pre-order running with Play.com as it was one of their pre-order specials they often used to do for PC games at £17.99. The game still looks pretty good 3 years on, so I might as well get it at the cheaper price for my troubles.

I just pre-ordered another game, Crysis, through Play and checked my outstanding orders: they’ve switched me to getting the ‘Limited Edition Tin’ version of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (wasn’t announced until recently) but at the same £17.99 price. Cool!

I have no idea whether Play consciously decided to ‘upgrade’ me for waiting so long, or whether it just happened that way in their system as they updated the product listings now that the game should finally be released. The standard and limited editions are the same price (£24.99) on Play now, so even though it’s clearly an easy thing for them to have done I commend them on it.

It’s the little pleasant surprises that keep customers happy and loyal.

Part of my life as a computer gamer involved running a site dedicated to the game Chaos League for a year or two, chaosleague|players (still running but not updated). Part of my much younger life was involved playing tabletop games such as Warhammer 40,000 and Blood Bowl. The two have just combined.

The reason chaosleague|players died off was that the UK publisher went but and so support for the game disappeared. The developers also got sued by Games Workshop, who felt that Chaos League ripped ideas from Blood Bowl. They’ve now made friends, with the Chaos League property going to Games Workshop and a licence to develop a series of three Blood Bowl games heading in the other direction.

It’s nice to see them come to such a good agreement and aside from the iffy PR of GW suing Cyanide, it could work out very well for them both. Chaos League had massive potential and Cyanide is a great development studio, but the publisher backing wasn’t there to allow them to evrything they wanted. Chaos League was also, in truth, the closest thing Blood Bowl fans had to an official Blood Bowl game (and a very good game it was too), so there was a ready (though under-exploited) market. The market bit was presumably what GW worried about and why they started legal proceedings. Now Games Workshop has a great developer working on Blood Bowl computer games with a good base of experience in the genre to start from, while Cyanide has official GW backing and should get more publisher support as a result.

I have to admit I’m enthused by this and I’ll be trying to get back in touch with Cyanide, who I had a good relationship with, to see if they can discuss any of their plans for the first game. I had been writing a full online league system for Chaos League’s expansion pack just before Digital Jesters died, so it never came to fruition and I’d like the chance to do it again (in Rails this time I think!) for a game that’s gonna have enough fan and publisher support to use it.

My brother got me to go to a talk/discussion session with Steve Grand (of Creatures fame) last night and it turned out to be very good.

The talk was part of the AV Festival, taking place across Newcastle/Gateshead (they really are slowly turning into the one city), Sunderland and Middlesbrough and was entitled ‘Artificial Life and Virtual Reality’. The base point of discussion was whether anything generated in a computer can ever be ‘real’, with a focus on intelligence/consciousness in a computer.

Considering the talk and following discussion spanned two hours and isn’t exactly light going, it’s quite hard to summarise, but basically Steve Grand says that a computer program can never be written to have a ‘real’ intelligence/consciousness/whatever you want to call it, but that a computer can (theoretically, with a powerful enough computer some time in the future) simulate an environment in which a ‘real’ thing can emerge: if you can model and simulate every atom in a person’s body within a computer, with the basic rules that apply to those atoms, then you should effectively have another version of that person, as the interactions of the atoms combine to create that person, their memories, etc.

I no doubt explain it particularly poorly, but then that’s why I’m not off being paid to give talks or write books on the subject. I do have a bit of an interest in artificial intelligence from working at a computer game studio and then writing my degree dissertation on path-finding for computer games though, and I have to agree with Steve Grand that all ‘AI’ work so far is not in fact intelligent, it’s just giving the impression of intelligence through a series of tests.

That’s pretty obvious - especially within the computer game world, where not much processing power can be handed over to the AI - but it’s got me to thinking about this theoretical point in the future when we might be able to have ‘real’ intelligence emerge through the creation of a suitably complex simulation of atoms/particles. If we could create real intelligence within a simulated world, what limits should we then put on its application?

Once we got to the point where we could generate a game world suitably complex that we could insert copies of people that could think independently, it would open a debate over whether they could continue to be used in the traditional way for computer game characters - often to be shot at or otherwise killed. If they have real intelligence, they surely have real feelings and so should not be subjected to being shot at for the entertainment of some ‘higher beings’. The argument could be there that in the end they’re still just lots of ones and zeros flying around in a computer, but as Steve grand pointed out last night, in the end so are we, just replacing ones and zeros with protons and electrons.

Luckily I don’t think it’s a problem we’ll have to contend with too soon (though you never know).

Anyway, Steve’s talk and his answers to a very wide range of questions afterwards were great, so kudos to him and kudos to my brother Christian for making me go see someone I’d never really heard of

I enjoy this blog-writing lark so much I started another one.

Following my entry into the world of Ruby on Rails, I’ve got a pretty decent forum system up and running and as a test data set, I imported all the forums, users and posts from my old website, Haloplayers. I’d been toying with the idea of re-launching the site for a while and the announcement that Halo 2 is finally on its way to the PC as well as my work on a new forum system (the best bit of Halo Players was the forum community) has pushed me over the edge into re-launching.

I’ve had a blog going for a while with the odd post now and then about potentially bringing the site back, but now I’ve opened it to the world to keep track of the progress made. There’s a partial screenshot of the forum system as a sneak-peek on there already, though since it was added (admittedly only yesterday) I’ve started to implement a new style, more along the lines of how I want the end product to look.

I think I’ll largely keep the new look under wraps (for a few days at least hehe) as it is still in development and could change again. There’s also a cool new feature or two that I don’t want to give away just yet

I recently dropped back in on my old Tribes/Halo team’s IRC channel for the first time in months and spotted a link to a very interesting post on TribalWar.

The suggestion very definitely seems to be that Garage Games are going to announce a spiritual successor to Tribes at GDC 06 next month. The Garage Games staff member who stirred this up posted a video of himself playing with a new tech demo of GG’s Torque engine and going for a mighty ski across a large landscape.

This is of course all speculation, but Tribes fans will take any sign of hope they can that they might finally get a decent succesor to Tribes 1. I’ve hosted the video here as it unsuprisingly got pulled from ajaxprotection’s blog.

Continuing the Rails theme and thanks to a tenuous link…

I spoke to an old acquaintance from my Haloplayers days for the first time in ages last night, who pointed me at the stunning upcoming game, Project Offset. I then followed a link from their news page to Red 5 Studios’ site, who just licensed the Offset Engine.

The Red 5 Studios site has a jobs listing up as they’re just starting work on a new project. The ‘Senior Web & DB Developer’ role was worth a look I thought and noticed one of the pluses is a developer with an ‘interest in Ruby on Rails‘. It’ll be interesting to see what, if anything, they’re planning on doing with Rails to integrate with the new game.

Shame I’m not a Java programmer hehe.