Mindflock.com
Social Game Artificial Intelligence
Colonization p1
Jan 30th
Ok, so colonies are setup. They spawn pioneers and you can control some options from the GUI (took a while and had to switch from C# to Javascript, neither of which we’ve used before).
Right now the pioneers just set off in random directions. They travel for a set amount of time and at a set speed. Then when they time out, they attempt to place a new colony. If the colony is too near another colony, they simply dont place the new one.
Next task is to add the colony sizing (colonies grow as resources allow) and the integration of pioneers such that if a pioneer cannot place a colony because of its proximity to a new one, the pioneer simply integrates back into the existing colony, adding to its population. Once we get that up and running and fix up a few UI issues so that there’s a maximum population and colony cap, we’ll put up a webplayer version. Never tried that before either 
Fun!
Orange spread related goodness
Jan 30th
So last time we talked about doing some social simulation. As ever time is tight, so we put off actually doing the work until this weekend.
We’re taking part in both the Global Game Jam and the Global Game Marmelade: http://aigamedev.com/open/upcoming/2009-marmalade/
As a fun little learning experience, we’ll be using Unity3D for this little test. Plus we’ll try and release some interim builds here on the blog. You’ll have to install unity web-plugin if you want to try them out, but I think the faster access to a demo build should be worth it.
So anyway, on with the show! First up is some kind of colony structure and the initial “pioneer” implementation. Colonies are representations of groups of people, pioneers represent the types of people who move away from the colony to start their own. Sounds like some kind of ant farm initially!
More soon.
Population simulation
Jan 20th
Right now there are a lot of reasons why we should be rethinking our approach to society. With the meltdown of international finance has come a need for re-evaluation of our social structures. Not least here in the UK where we are in a very poor position.
It started a chain reaction of thought, that led from the outer edges of the nations politics, to the very core of socialism vs capitalism and then deeper still.
Ultimately it led to this question:
Does land ownership lead to fundamental inequalities?
In order to explore that question, we’re putting together a prototype game concept that explores the absolute basics of population. It starts off with a model of a single civilised dwelling space and then models the spread of population from there. Here are the rules so far:
- Each game update, the resources of a particular population center rises by a “productivity rate”, this is determined either randomly (for now) or by sampling the landscape (later).
- Each population center, at a given (semi random) rate, spawns a new member of the population.
- When enough new members spawn, an agent is sent out from the population center, these can either be foragers, defenders, attackers, or pioneers
- Foragers collect resource for the population center
- Defenders defend against enemy attack
- Attackers seek to destroy any nearby population centers (that have not been directly spawned by them)
- Pioneers set out into unpopulated areas and try to found a new civilisation.
- The amount of population in a center will be governed by the amount of resource available in inverse proportion.
These simple rules should form at least the basis of the starting phase of population. There are other small rules involved about how far pioneers travel and how big populations can grow, but roughly the idea is that a certain amount of population is sustainable, but the concept of “growth” which is used throughout capitalist economies suggests that populations inevitably rise. This should in theory lead to imbalances in the population and more importantly the rise in increased population density in a concentrated mass of population.
It really is just a simple little prototype experiment. No particular goal other than to see what happens. If it turns out anywhere near interesting we’ll try and make it available somehow (maybe do a unity web-player version).
Anyway, need to go and work on population growth now. Video soon!
Social greetings and proxemics
Jan 6th
Social greetings like the kind you get when a new person approaches a group is what interests me right now. The whole “social greeting” aspect of groups can be quite varied both within and between cultures. In some cultures, it is quite common to kiss as a form of greeting. In others that would imply a level of intimacy that is quite uncommonly displayed. The anthropologist Dr E.T. Hall (who sadly died in 2009) called the study of this phenomenon “proxemics”. To quote his definition proxemics is: “The study of man’s transactions as he perceives and uses intimate, personal, social and public space in various settings while following out of awareness dictates of cultural paradigms.”
You can read more about Hall here
The relationship of proxemics and other non verbal cue’s such as kinesics, paralanguage and others is where my current focus lies. My theory being that without a deeper understanding of the human methods of non-verbal communication we simply cannot engender our virtual characters with a fully developed “human-like” set of behaviours.
One of the biggest issues, is that we are constrained by so many factors when creating games. It is almost impossible to imagine that fully capable non-verbal communication is ever going to be something that we will achieve with a hand-crafted approach, like many other aspects of characters are today. The industry as a whole has taken to using motion capture data to drive character animation because it is as close to human-like as it can be (although I have spoken to many animators who decry the use of motion capture data). But I feel that only via modelling and run-time generation of aspects like gesture, posture, gaze, proxemics, kinesics and paralanguage are we truly going to make our characters feel believable.
One current technical problem which must be overcome is that of inter-agent touch. Without contact based communication we will never make our agents feel alive. So the big question is how to achieve that. I see some potential for the inverse kinematic approach that was used in Assasins Creed, although I can’t find the video on youtube right now that shows some issues with the crowd pushing IK.
Human touch is a key aspect of communication and yet we hardly ever see it displayed in games outside of cutscenes which denote intimacy. The big problem is weirdly one of physics, in that currently it is very hard to get agents to actually contact each other without getting inter-penetration of limbs. Basically the issue is that humans in games are visually represented as meshes of increasing complexity, however their physical counterparts in the simulation are actually represented commonly as sets of linked bodies. Typically these bodies are simple volumes, often spheres or capsules. Clearly this representation is a vast simplification of the overall form of a human, but it is required in order for the physical simulation to be able to perform at an interactive rate.
So touch is definitely an area that needs considerable work. However right now my main concern is proximity as I feel that it is proximity (and posture, gaze etc) that leads to the relationships required for touch to be applicable. Proximity is the first part of any human interaction, in that in order to have real human communication (not mediated via some other system) we are required to be in proximity to each other. Hall actually determined that there were different aspects of proximity and different affective relationships amongst them. He also noted that there were differences between cultures and between varying relationships (same sex, different sex, different stages of intimacy etc). Issues like how far apart we are, wether we are actually facing each other or not. Unfortunately I don’t feel games are really very good at this yet. Often games have characters looking directly at each other, with an unflinching gaze and with a posture that seems aggressive. It will take some time for the industry to start considering these aspects to be important, but as we see more work developed in this area I feel we will slowly work things out. Much like facial and body animation has improved, I see the other elements of non-verbal communication improving.
The real question is can we actually use this to make more convincing and compelling characters and does that add significantly to the experience of the game?