Havok – Havok is a very robust physic engine which allows alot of objects on screen at a time.
Euphoria – Euphoria means that the NPC’s have true biomechanical AI.
DMM (Digital Molecular Matter) – The way of simulating the substances of objects.
Here is a video of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, the video shows how HEDMM will be used in the game.
NPC stands for Non-playable character. NPC’s are the characters in a game that are controlled by the AI. Here is a picture from the game Mafia, it shows a city populated with NPC’s. Here a screen-shot of the player in the enviroment with the NPC’s.
The ‘core tasks’ of NPC are to seem realistic in the environment. For example if the NPC was an alien it might react to a joke different to say the way a human would react to the joke. But in an action game they might be given the task of killing you and they would do that to the best of their abilities.
NPC’s require alot of data to perform their task properly. They need to identify hiding positions, analyse 3D topology (not walking into buildings), it needs to find away to flank an enemy if he is in cover and it needs to choose the correct position of the camera.
Another name for world navigation is called ‘path-finding’.
World navigation is broken down into 2 sub-divisions. The first division is called world navigation, the second is called local navigation. The only real difference between the 2 is the scope. World navigation handles the geography of the game whilst the local navigation handles rooms, characters and objects.
I believe that the local navigation is more dynamic because it is having to deal with the characters and objects.
Flocking algorithms are the boundaries given to an NPC in a game that effect the way the NPC behaves. Basic flocking consists of three main rules.
Separation – Avoid crowding neighbours
Alignment – steer towards average heading of neighbours
Cohesion – steer towards average position of neighbours
Peter believes this because as time goes by our technology increases which means that the level of AI increases. He wants to make games that have people who think and have emotions. Also if the AI is good enough maybe we will begin to care about the NPCs.
Jess believes that balance is important because if a game is too realistic then fun will be removed. If a game is not fun anymore then the gamer will not want to play on it anymore. He also believes that variety and randomness are important aswell - variety in behaviors and some unpredictability within the believeable realm.
Chess can be considered “emergent game play” as it has a set of assigned rules that the computer must follow. But it can go about playing the game any way it wants as long as it stays within the rules.
Here is an example of an emergent game.
Star Wars Galaxies
And here is another example of an emergent game.
The Matrix Online
The War of the Worlds (Radio Play): The War of the Worlds was an episode on an American radio drama anthology series. It was performed as a halloween special on October 30th 1938. It was directed by Orson Welles and was an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel War of the Worlds. It was performed to sound like a series of news bulletins. People believed that the earth was really being invaded by martians, this caused mass panic within the towns and cities of the United States. This is a good example of how powerful the media can be.
Super Size Me:
The disadvantages of a mesh based character system is that it has alot of polygons and vertices to handle. Also that you have to position each point of the mesh for every frame instead of them moving all at once.
The advantages of a skeletal mesh are that instead of moving all the points individually, you only have to move the skeleton. Considering there are only 50 bones, it is very easy to animate.
The first picture shows a character skeleton, this shows all the pivot points that character can bend and transform at. The second picture shows the skeleton inside the character mesh. The skeleton will combine with the mesh so that when the skeleton is moved the mesh will move aswell.
“To ‘weight’ each vertex individually” is the process of snapping the mesh to the skeleton. If the ‘weight’ is decreased then the mesh does not snap to the skeleton properly and the mesh looks deformed.
Here is a picture of a ‘Hierarchical’ skeletal system.
A ‘Hierarchical’ skeletal system works in a very unique way. Instead of all the parts being moved individually, they are connect. This means that if a parent bone is move for example a knee bone, then all corresponding child bones will move aswell like the foot bones.
If I were to animate a character I would use Inverse Kinematics because the movement would be controlled by the hand as that is the body part which is going to pick up the object. Also because the hand is in control the body will follow the hand in a proper fashion like a real body would.
The LOD (Level of Detail) system is the system that works out how many polygons need to be on screen at one time, for example if a building is in the background then it won’t need to be as detailed then if it was in the foreground. The LOD system is very important because it takes some of the strain away from your PC by reduceing the polygon count on objects that don’t need a high level of detail.
Mocap stands for Motion Capture, Mocap is the process of capturing the way a human would react and move in the real world and then transferring it into the game world. When mocapping, actor are dressed in suits that have small white balls placed all over them. Specials cameras that can only see these balls transfer the movements in real time into a computer. Eventually these movements will be use in a game. Here is 2 examples of games that use mocap.
The first game is Rainbow Six: Vegas. Here is an image of actors doing motion capture.
Here is a video of motion capture being performed for Rainbow Six: Vegas.
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/11692.html
Here is a list of level editing tools.
Sandbox Editor – Crysis
UnrealEd – Unreal
Lunar Magic Level Editor – Super Mario World
