As my user number attests, I've been on board /. from nigh near the beginning. I may not read /. with the near obsessive frequency I did in the 90s, but I still poke my nose in now and again for news. I also had the pleasure of meeting you and Hemos at the 1999 Lokihack, which you both judged. I remembered coming away from Marietta more impressed by how sharp and gee golly nice you guys were. I knew then, more than ever, that /. was in good hands. I think I might even have saved some of your original /. business cards.

(The tragic irony is that I learned about your resignation via twitter, and not from checking ./ itself. Oy.)

So very sorry that you're leaving, but I well understand that occasionally one needs to hit the ole magic reset on life, to move on to a new, fresh chapter. We can only keep on the same trajectory for so long before burn out saps the will to live. So, all the best on starting your next chapter; if the previous one is an indicator, it'll be a doozy.

Cheers,

Mark Coletti
(User 367)

As an aside I thought that Bioshock addressed the facial animation problem with a clever hack: have the agents wear masquerade masks. No visible face! No need for animations! (And they even managed to make it fit into the back story.)

As pointed out below, the easy way to dynamically adapt game play is to add or subtract game elements as needed. However, it may be more interesting to allow the game AI to adapt -- instead of adding or subtracting objects have the AI continue to learn during game play. That is, for some games the AI learns "offline" -- it may be trained using many runs in a headless simulation mode; once the game is shipped the AI's knowledge doesn't change since learning is "turned off." But if learning can still happen during normal game play, then adaption will happen implicitly.

Of course that sounds really simple, but may actually be a bear to implement. For example, learning has associated overhead which might have an impact on game performance. (Which is normally why it would be done offline during development.) And if the AI is fairly simple to begin with then it might not make sense to have it learn during normal game play.