That was one of the crucial lessons from Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach : apparently complex behavior can arise from the interaction of a few simple (hidden) rules. He tells the story of putting a ball on the floor in a class. The ball would zip to a part of the floor, hit something, pause...

Yes, of course; after someone explicitly says, "I changed the code," my first thought on seeing any graphical weirdness should be that, as a mere User, my skull is stuffed full of dried sticks and dead wasps and I should automatically know that the real problem is me and my browser's cache. I do a f...

David Paris has an interesting blog entry at Gamasutra today on building an AI infrastructure for groups of NPCs. Here's an excerpt: Instead of trying to solve a massive problem in one [fell] swoop, I taught the AI to solve very simple problems and then layered these solutions to create more and mor...

I'm in a funny mood tonight.

New theme: rock music with yodeling in it.

"One Earth" by The Art of Noise

"Hocus Pocus" by Focus

Others?

Everything I need to know about firing a battleship's main guns I learned from watching Under Siege . Totally accurate, right? Also: "Cold hearted orb that rules the night Removes the colours from our sight Red is gray and yellow, white But we decide which is right And which is an illusion" A good f...

Well, here I was at my home PC, all ready to get a screenshot of the new humongonormous text... ...except that now, of course, it looks perfectly normal. :| In the absence of (more) evidence to the contrary I'm going to assume I'm not actually insane or suffering from some form of extremely specific...

Thymine, it's maybe worth noting that basic versions of some of the sensor functions you proposed existed in the Limit Theory Prototype. For example, there was a dead-simple and 100% guaranteed (if in range) lock-on feature. It didn't tell you anything or provide any functionality beyond designating...

MrPerson, over in the NPC Automatic Fund Generating thread, suggested some ideas that got me thinking about factions -- in particular, about how characters -- both the player and leader NPCs -- will attract and manage their followers. 1. Through what mechanisms will the player and NPC characters gai...

DWMagus, we touched on those points in this week's Fligher Podcast -- I think you're exactly right to mention them here. I happen to like the idea of using sensors to obtain useful tactical intel, but I'm also the kind of person who enjoys slower, more thoughtful gameplay. I don't mind the occasiona...

This is starting to sound like it's edging toward a kind of formalized level-based progression system. Just speaking for myself, I'd be happier with Limit Theory if it didn't do that, but instead allowed every character (player and NPCs) to do everything. You'd be bad at most things to start with, u...

As Josh Himself said in this thread : The final goal of the UI is to make interaction as fast and natural as possible, period . Anything that does not achieve this goal will not be considered a success and will be torn out without a moment's hesitation :) That being said, I have a certain faith that...

Gazz wrote:What do you mean?
The font size is about the same as for a topic title.

Not on my PC they're not; they're enormous.

I can send a screenshot when I'm at my PC late tonight if that wound be helpful.

Note that I'm not objecting to the change itself. The new text is just really large for me.

I don't know; I'm a little concerned that people might not see the links.

Was there no font size larger than TheEntireBleedinUniverse 5000?

Just_Ice_au wrote:Josh, quo confidimus

Nice.

One has been hinted at already: the speed at which a weapon's effect is applied. For example, suppose lasers are immediate, mass drivers are very fast, missiles are moderately fast, plasma cannons are moderately slow, and torpedoes are (relatively) very slow. And further suppose that various defense...

The "interesting choices" thing is usually attributed to Sid "Civilization" Meier. An important point about this is that what makes a choice interesting or not isn't the choice itself -- it's that the choice has consequences generated by the game that are reflected back to the player that enable add...