FPS is slick but tired. It's becoming a commodized format that is sorely in need of not just new genres, but new gameplay mechanics. In other words, the actions of "Move To Place"/"Act On Object"/"Fight With Being" are Ye Olde Hat. Even when combined into a neat bunch of puzzles, to achieve a new location/object/fight, are flavors in an ever-diminishing cup.

  The market for games is new large enough that targeting a subsection of that market could be profitable. If the commodization of the capable engines continues, focus on the design content, storyline, and others may soon follow. I already know of a plenty of texture manipulation packages that line up the "to do" list of surfaces and transitions so that you have to simple fill out the spots (albeit a huge lineup of nice images) to re-skin.

  But what I want is to start injecting programmability into the FPS environements. I want to run a Corewars+QuakeArea game, with bots linking to one another, communicating, learning. I want algorithms to be shaped, reshaped by hours of tourneys, and eventually reach the limits of the platform.

  Game AI is finely tuned, since bots could have perfect reflexes, perfect aim, etc. But let's make maps that demand more advanced path algorithms, let's have bots attack the puzzle collections. Let's present the bot language to the gamer, and have them simply watch, or perhaps coach, the bots during gameplay.

  I'd much more enjoy a war sim if the "eye in the sky" coaching was tweaking bots in real time, dealing with variables as "fear", "erratic behavior" or "hubris" in a bot. early on, we're doomed to a limited platform for such things, but with some amount of movement from that huge market, we ought to see games commoditize the AI control platforms much like physics engines are are to be in the next 5 years.

Started uploading the basement tracks out into the world. Enjoy!

  Have a listen

Short essay on the side effects I'm noticing on maintaining offshore-contracted code.

Ask a web-based bot to define something, and you're almost guaranteed to get an english paragraph, written in part or wholly by humans and sitting on a site, or in a cache found by a spider.

  Now, this itself isn't bad, and it's gotten us almost all the "reference" material one could ask for on certain topics. Images and videos are now emerging as the next target of the human search realm.

  Now, what if there were a series of extended descriptive templates anyone could fill out? These templates were a general format (like Unicode) that could be used to describe something for a particular sensory function. For example, you wanted to learn the shape of an apple, and a normalized, general format 3D mesh would appear. Also, there would be links to the development cycle, varieties, diseases, etc. For the most part, a "representative sample" for such an open-ended search such as "apple" returned a red 3D mesh, complete with descriptive qualities of the make up this mesh.

But then again, a mesh is really just a surface formula used to approximate a real thing. Perhaps a full-blown language is necessary to codify the whole apple, subsections, and so on. When this language was read through a "visual" template, it returned a picture of the apple, but enabling a 3D slicing/dicing of the object. When run through a "tactile" template, it returned something that could describe the touch of an apple. Smell, Taste, etc. Our computer-human interfaces are really only auditory and visual, so for now perhaps only that information gets focus.

Obviously, this language would be most easily adopted if it:

• Used existing web technology to encode the proposed language
• Was approachable through the use of tools and/or techniques that allowed anyone to contribute to the body of information
• Was globally accessible and yet politically agnostic - not encoding into any regional format and not locked away from any set of users.

Proposals:

  - Extend HTML or a variant (perhaps through some of the open-ended tags/attributes for custom data) to encode the visual and auditory holdings of a concept or thing.
  - Provide a series of tools to encode information into this format. It should take in visual and auditory information to a greater degree than a simple picture.
  - Provide a tool to consume this information, enabling drill-into capabilities for the visual information, markups, etc.

These of course is sort of a Wiki with extended information. In fact, extended Wikipedia in this way would be a great undertaking. "Person" references could bring up a video of that person. This doesn't need much in the way of new technology. However, if "Object" references were more fully flushed out to include this Mesh concept, and a small java window to spin/slice/zoom the object, I think more folks would be drawn to it.

Candidate Technologies:
  - Generalized 3D meshes, or material composition languages. (POV-Ray's C-like syntax is a crude example)
  - Encoded sound in a compressed format, but transferable in both test-based and binary formats.
  - Certain medical imagery interfaces, whereby 3D images can be explored in a CAT-scan like manner.

The ever-growing uses for information connectivity:

• HTML, Hyperlinks
• Blogging, Commenting
• Peer-to-Peer Networking/File Share tools, personal-hosting
• Collabortive Knowledgebase-ware (Wiki's)
• Social Networking Sites

If we can begin to fill out more complex templates for the world described in all this web content, then perhaps a semantic web may be borne of it. At least, a better version of AI or at least NLP could result.

More to come...

An ongoing research project:

The "Information Age" era so far is the 100 years from 1950 to (perhaps) 2050. It subsists not on the year-by-year declarations of "Information wants to be free" or "digital is open" and so on, but merely from the combined long-term effects of:

• Information and the machines to store/access it are ubiquitous and relatively cheap.
• The more open flow of information creates a multitude of societal changes, some overlapping and some trumping each other.
• Society thrashes and skitters on new concepts until they slowly settle, limited only by scientific physical barriers. Attempts to control these changes politically or with laws consume huge amounts of energy, but are eventually defeated.
• The pioneers of the era are defined by pushing information's movement and creation. Cataloging, summarizing, capturing, copying and distributing information causes a flood of public experiments to fork and mature. Best of breed winners, fragmentation and eventually encapsulation make the interim market.
• Societal change happens, and yet concepts that divide groups migrate to new mediums, continuing much of the stife between these groups across the globe. Group-based feedback systems repeatedly report that the era's new platforms do little to change minds, and much to only reflect them.
• The era only ends when the feedback loops on this information are on a slowing curve. At the moment, these loops are only expanding, where new systems to re-process the growing body of information create ever more metadata. Decision-based systems using this metadata are the most useful levels of the era - and only when slowing will the era be in decline.
• As of 2006, we are in the prime of this era.

Ok, so its been about a year of /.'ing and i've come to rely on it as my constant work distraction. Be it reading, commenting or moderation, or modding, I'm addicted.

I'm constantly enjoying how vast the world of computer age really is. The niches are numerous and so deep I get a great sense of satisfaction that I always have a lot to learn.

Even as I try to move among different technologies, I like the "worldly" sense one gets from reading /. I can truely say I've gotten a little education perusing the high modded comments on a subject.