https://twitter.com/Polytron/status/361188665709436928

I’m kind of bummed about the prospect of no Fez 2. I hope he changes his mind.

Phil Fish had been taking quite a bit of Twitter abuse lately which culminated with a back and forth with a game journalist.

Anyone who is on Facebook has probably seen family or friends wilt quickly from even the mildest of criticism.  Game developers, by contrast, are very closely connected with the players who often have very direct access to them.  I can tell you, from experience, it gets really old really fast constantly being criticized or (since I can’t come up with a more sophisticated turn of phrase) lied about.

As a notoriously short-fused guy myself, the level of scrutiny people get, particularly "successful" people is something few people can withstand. I read insane crap on twitter all the time (and I suspect most of you do too). Being a game developer doesn't imbue someone with magic tact powers.

A lot of game developers (and I put myself in this category) have an almost unhealthy level of passion to please those who play their games. This can turn very very ugly when there are bumps in the road.

From a purely business perspective, those people (and I put myself in this category) probably shouldn't be interacting directly with people on the Internet. But the problem is, it's that interaction that fuels their passion to make games in the first place.

So on the one hand, Phil Fish should probably not be interacting with strangers, publicly, on the Internet (or at least, not without some controls) but on the other hand, if you take that away, a lot of the motivation and drive to make games goes with it. That's why the age old "You need to hire a PR minder!" doesn't work on that personalty type.

It would be, imo, financially insane for Phil Fish not to make a Fez 2. But people like him are rarely driven by financials.

Just got back from New York on the Atari auction. 

Being an inappropriate and embarrassing person, I naturally took pictures of the location as it was just plain amazing.

Here are some pictures from the auction.

Outside the window.

Each bidder was given a conference room where they could work out the purchase agreements with Atari and the investment bankers as well as just spend time working between the auctions.

This was taken at the back of the auction room.

This is the skyline.

I won’t say in this post who won the various auctions as I don’t want to step on someone else’s announcement.  I will tell you how the auctions went.

Typically (except in the case of Battlezone and Moonbase Commander) the bidders are placed together in a room. Each bidder is assigned a bid order in a given round.  Each round, the bidder can agree to raise their bid $20,000 over the previous bidder or choose to pass. If they choose to pass, they’re out of the bidding and it continues.

The head of Stardock Entertainment (Derek Paxton aka Kael) did the bidding on one of the items were were interested in and I bid in a later auction on a different item.

At the end of the auction, the highest bidder and second highest bidder then negotiate a finalized purchase agreement of the intellectual property assets in question.  If the highest bidder, for whatever reason, fails to close the deal, the second highest bidder than gets it. 

We went there to get two items in particular. One in particular we really really wanted because we are insane fans of the series.  That one we got.  The other we wanted we didn’t get, we were the second highest bidder.

I imagine there will be announcements next week by the new IP holders to whom I congratulate.  It’ll be good to see these awesome games brought back in one form or other.

I'm posting this from my Surface RT (on an airplane no less).

When I first got my Surface RT, I really liked the hardware but the software was in a terrible state. 

Now, 9 months later, I am happy to report that Microsoft has so improved Surface RT that if I bought a Surface RT today and compared it to what I had back last Fall I would think it was a "Surface RT 2". 

So what's changed?

First off, it's much faster.  Gone is the lag when I was typing or launching things. It's just plain snappy.

Secondly, SKyDrive is much much better integrated in.  When I first got the Surface, the Skydrive integration into Office was so woefully slow and unreliable that it was largely useless.  That isn't to say SkyDrive is perfect, it still should integrated into explorer as if it were...you know...a DRIVE except where the data is stored in the sky.

Office RT has steadily improved as well and so have the other Microsoft related apps.  I still detest the Sype RT user interface but that isn't Surface RT's problem.

Plane is getting ready to land.  Cheers!

I’m going to try to keep this as brief as I can.

One of the most common complaints I see about strategy games is that the AI doesn’t play well.  That is, in fact, a reality and there are a lot of reasons for it which I want to talk about in this blog.

The biggest factory today against good AI is the bell curve.  If you can make the AI “good enough” to beat 90% of the players on a reasonably high difficulty, it gets very tough to justify the extra expense in making it better.

As much as people complain about AI in say, Civilization V, it is probably good enough to beat most people on Prince or higher.  But that is little consolidation to those who find it easy to beat.  The same is true on Fallen Enchantress and its expansion, Legendary Heroes.  Once you make it good enough to beat “most people” it gets hard to justify spending money on more time on it.

A friend of mine in Firaxis used to beat Civilization V (or IV, I forget which) because he had figured out patterns in the random number generator.  That’s a pretty tough threshold to top in terms of “knowing the game”.

But why isn’t AI just inherently better?  After all, I’ve seen a lot of people talk about how good the AI in Galactic Civilizations II is.  And that comes down to how AI is made today versus how it used to be made.

In Civilization IV (and in Galactic Civilizations II) the game designer also wrote the AI including the worker functions.  This meant that the designer knew exactly what the AI would do in various circumstances.  The problem with that is that as games have gotten bigger, it has gotten a lot tougher for the designer to have time to both manage the many parts of the game’s design and find time to write the AI.

In the original Elemental: War of Magic, I wrote mainly the high level algorithms.  I didn’t have time to write the AI itself.  For Fallen Enchantress, I wrote the high level tactical AI and the high level strategic AI.  What that means is that I have the AI call various worker functions like “AIGetAreaThreat(radius)”.

In Civilization IV, Soren Johnson, the designer, wrote the both the high level AI and all of the worker functions too.  That’s very hard core and extremely rare these days.  I wrote the high level AI and the worker functions in Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar and that was the last game I got to do that on (in Twilight, I relied on worker functions written by the team).

The problem with AI worker functions comes down to communication between developers.  It takes so little for an AI to be stupid or to seem stupid.  Let me give you an example of something I worked on this evening:  When the AI decides whether or not a city is defended enough, it calls “AIGetAreaThreat()”.  However, after wiping out the AI one too many times because its cities were poorly defended I decided to look at this function.  It turns out, it wasn’t looking inside enemy cities (i.e. if a city was stationed in a city, it didn’t “see” it).  

I know when I call AIGetAreaThreat() I want to know all the units, not just the units on the map.  But that’s the thing, another developer might think you only mean units on the map (such as in this case).  You add enough examples like that and suddenly you end up with non-ideal AI.

The problem with writing worker AI functions is that they are really…really time consuming.  And AI developers tend to be expensive.  Firaxis got lucky with Soren back in Civilization IV.  But that’s an atypical situation (I think Soren also wrote the AI in Civilization III as well but I could be wrong). 

Now, in the case of Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes, I play the game post-release so I can, in my spare time, update the AI (which is what I’m doing at 9pm on a Monday).  But that’s atypical and could never be economically justified by a studio because, as-is, the AI in these games is typically more than “good enough” for most people.

“Good enough”, of course, is a symptom of a different problem and that is how disposable modern games are and the changes that attitude has had on the industry and how games are made.

Since the beginning of Fallen Enchantress, people have claimed that the AI monsters will sit next to any enemy city and not attack.  They concluded that the monsters were giving AI players a pass. 

I have responded that I have looked at the code over and over and the monsters do not treat computer players any differently.

Well, tonight I’m seeing the behavior very starkly.

These ogres should be wiping out this AI city.

The code says that the ogres want to wipe out the AI city.

They are explicitly targeting it.

..

And yet..

The attack never happens.

As a result, the monsters are just standing there, stuck outside the city.   Now, I’ve got a few thousand hours of game time on this and this is the first time I’ve seen it where I knew it should be attacking (i.e. I’ve seen well defended cities with monsters outside).  So it’s not that common.  But based on forum feedback, it’s definitely something others have seen.

Now, I have to find out why they are being prevented from attacking.

Stay tuned..

Update 1: Seems to be path finding related. This is going to take some digging.

Update 2:

New check in.

+ AI Removed conflicting code that caused monsters to behave outside the control of the AI
+ AI Monsters more careful about leaving their lairs unguarded.
+ AI Updated the area threat evaluation to include stationed units.
+ AI champions significantly better about taking out enemy outposts and grabbing goodie huts on the way to another destination
+ AI better at building more lethal armies
+ AI much better at protecting its cities
+ AI fixed a bug where certain AI personalities had a chance of not building units when they should depending on the type of city
+ AI more aggressive about training units when it feels that city is vulnerable
+ AI no longer has a "auto patrol" system. Instead, the monster AI directly controls monsters and not the mobileobject system.
+ Fixed a pathfinding bug that caused monsters that were calculating a destination to not be able to set a destination IF the target was 1 tile away and it is a city.

I  never intended to start a company. I wanted to make CPUs.

Monroe Bank and Trust interviewed me for our 20th corporate birthday.  You can check it out here:

http://www.monroebankandtrustcares.com/2013/06/focus-on-our-customers-brad-wardell-and.html

Hi all! As some of you know, Draginol is my “alt” handle here for Frogboy.

Anyway, this week I was on PolyCast, a popular Civilization-related podcast and this episode focused heavily on the upcoming Civilization V expansion “Brave New World”.

Feel free to check it out here:

http://civcomm.civfanatics.com/polycast/polycast/season7/episode176.mp3

You can see other episodes here:

http://civcomm.civfanatics.com/polycast/polycast/season7.php

The technological singularity is defined to be the point in which technological progress is increasing at a rate that human level intelligence can no longer predict what will come next.

We are closer to that time than most people think.

There are a lot of technologies most people expect to happen that I don’t think will happen or, if they do happen, will be relevant for a startling short amount of time.

For example, strong AI.  My day programming job is AI (for games anyway). It’s been an abiding passion of mine for 20 years. But I don’t think we have to worry about a strong AI wiping out us mere mortals. If anything, strong AI and post-humans will evolve together and the lines between the two will be blurred.

When I use the term, Strong AI, I am really talking about an AI that is truly artificial (i.e. not modeled on our own intelligence).  That is the type of AI that I am skeptical occurring.  I know that Kurzweil believes this is inevitable but just like he (and I for that matter) believe that gene therapy is going to have a short life-span, I believe that artificial intelligence engines are going to have a short life-span, at least in the traditional envisioning of them. 

It's sort of like robots. There are lots of people who imagine the future is going to be filled with intelligent (sentient) robots.  I don't see this happening at all.  I think our technological progress is becoming so rapid that we'll bypass sentient robots as a solution to things just like we'll bypass long-term genetic therapy and long-term plans on moving human biologics around the solar system.

Instead, we'll simply keep extending more and more of "us" into "the cloud".  It won't happen overnight. I don't think we'll be doing any sort of intrusive inorganic conversion (i.e. I don't see us becoming Borg-like).  Eventually (and by eventually I really mean 25 years from now) most of what makes "us" us will be in the cloud at which point you could argue that this enhanced version of us is in effect, "AI" because we'll have vastly expanded our intelligence using artificial means.

I realize when we look at a fixed point in time -- 2013 -- what I say above may seem absurd to some.  But, then again, someone in 1813 would think the future we live in today would have been an absurd scenario.  We already are using artificial means to greatly expand our individual capabilities. 

Let’s look at 1813.

In 1813, homes were still primarily lit with candles (if you were rich, most people, if they lit their homes, did so with animal fat and other rather nasty stuff). Furniture, such as it was, was kept up against walls. The idea of having furniture in the middle of the room would be ridiculous (you'd trip on it in the dark all the time).  It wouldn't be until Whale Oil became common (the whale oil boom started in the 1700s) that lamps would start to become a wide-spread solution (again for the rich countries of the world) which led to kerosene and then gas and of course electrical lighting.

Today, in 2013, I can, from my person, turn on and off the steady, perfect, illumination in my home from across the world. I have control the temperature of my home from across the world. I can "command" my home to play movies on the television for guests even if I'm not at home (mind you, in 1813, the equivalent entertainment would be going to the theater to watch a live performance). Point being in 2013, an individual can command light, heat, cool, entertainment and more via their constructs (their tiny machines) from anywhere in the world. 

None of the above scenario required me to insert wires or electrodes into my body.

And I want to emphasize this: The pace of this progress is accelerating exponentially. That's why so many people have a rough time realizing that our dreams of a Star Trek future or one of robots or even a future where we're all genetically modified super beings will never come to pass because technology will outpace those inventions. They'll never have a chance to really get going.  We'll still have some of this stuff but they'll go the way of the telegraph except unlike the telegraph which lasted many decades, the things I mention above many only get a few years of spotlight before being passed on by.

In the time that this forum is likely to still exist, I predict (And we can refer back to this in another 10 years) that 10 years from now (and this forum is 12 years old already) that the idea of sending biological human beings to Mars will seem ridiculous to a lot of people, if not most people.

One more personal example of how our individual capabilities, enhanced via our machines, is trumping our "meat".  As some of you know, I'm an amateur astronomer. I've spent many thousands of dollars over the years on telescopes.  I still, for the kids and such, will haul out one of my smaller ones to show them Jupiter or Saturn.  But that's about it.  Why? Because today, I can simply take control of a robotic telescope in an observatory somewhere in the world (like the Canary Islands) and look at the sky with that.  Why would I futz with a 14 inch telescope (if you've ever used a large non-permanent positioned telescope you know what I mean) when I can "see" the same thing with a much better telescope?

And we're just beginning.  Aug Glasses are coming (Google glass being a primitive example), Aug Chairs an when they figure out how to connect our "meat" inputs to the cloud in a way that is culturally acceptable, we'll have Aug us and at that point, the singularity will be upon us.

My hopes are so high for is movie!

I'm wondering if Clark Kent (with glasses) ever makes an appearance?

As discussed here, the climate models that predicted a rapidly warming earth continue to be way way off.

The measured results and the projected results are way off.

I’ve received a lot of grief over the years from friends, family and colleagues because I’m a global warming “skeptic” (particularly about AGW). 

Now mind you, I drive an electric car powered by a solar array and live in a house heated and cooled through Geothermal and had a gold rating from the NAHB.  I personally fall into the “the less impact I can have on the environment, the better” line. But there’s a big difference between what I voluntarily do and what the government tries to coerce me and other people to do and when it comes to AGW, I don’t think the evidence is compelling enough to justify a world wide economic depression.

6 years ago, I wrote an article called “What happens if the Earth starts cooling?” which speculated on what would environmentalists say if their predictions turned out to be wrong. 6 years later, the measured temperatures for 2012 are less than those of 2006 which in turn were less than 2005 which where less than 2003 which were less than 1998.  I’m not arguing a trend down but now that global temperatures have gotten highly politicized, the measured temperatures are now much more scrutinized than they used to be (which is why I take the precision of temperatures in say 1950 with a grain of salt).

What should be reasonably irrefutable at this stage is that the climate models are wrong. By a lot.  According to the models, the mean atmospheric temperatures should be well over almost 0.50 degrees higher than they were in 2000.  Instead, it’s within the margin of error of being the same. 

None of this should mean that we shouldn’t try to reduce our impact on the environment. But hopefully people will start to decouple their political beliefs from their scientific beliefs. Skepticism isn’t a bad thing.

I’d like to think I’m doing my part but I did this voluntarily.