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Re: Pareidolic Icons

Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2014 8:38 am
by Vartul
Someone with beta access and coding skills could simply mod in the Pareidolic icons with feedback from Hyperion. Any takers?

Re: Pareidolic Icons

Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2014 8:48 am
by Lum
I thought beta testing have other goals than that. Specially in this case. But if Josh allows modding in this phase of development... well :thumbup:

Re: Pareidolic Icons

Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2014 10:20 am
by Hyperion
Talvieno wrote:
Cha0zz wrote:With what I've seen in the last update, this idea seems suddenly very possible. ヽ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽ノ
That's the exact same thought I had while I was watching! I was planning on posting here immediately afterwards. Hyperion will be beyond pleased. :D
When he made those procedural icons symmetrical, I damn near lost a monitor... from nearly spitting out my drink, but seeing what Josh did in a few minutes, he could likely have the 2D version of the idea complete in a few hours, the 3D version might take a day... Or maybe just an hour more.

But of course when I mentioned it to him in IRC, he was silent as ever on the subject...

Re: Pareidolic Icons

Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2014 10:47 am
by Talvieno
Now, here's an idea... It's not likely to make it into the game, and it would have to be hard-coded to really work, I think... But.

What if.

What if your actions in the game shaped your own Pareidolic Icon? What if it started as a neutral, dull gray, with straight, flat lines.. and over the course of the game, it changed according to your actions, as the game interpreted your playing style and therefore your equivalent personality.

Re: Pareidolic Icons

Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2014 10:52 am
by Cha0zz
Talvieno wrote:Now, here's an idea... It's not likely to make it into the game, and it would have to be hard-coded to really work, I think... But.

What if.

What if your actions in the game shaped your own Pareidolic Icon? What if it started as a neutral, dull gray, with straight, flat lines.. and over the course of the game, it changed according to your actions, as the game interpreted your playing style and therefore your equivalent personality.
It's harder than just random icons but certainly possible.

To expand, in addition to color you could also use line types, someone non aggressive and helpful would have rounder lines, so an icon with less edges while a more aggressive person could have hard straight lines, creating an icon with a lot of edges.

Re: Pareidolic Icons

Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2014 11:03 am
by Talvieno
I like those ideas too! And yes, it would definitely be a lot harder. Detecting someone's playing style/personality and turning it into an NPC personality equivalent would be difficult to say the least.

Re: Pareidolic Icons

Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2014 11:06 am
by Cha0zz
Talvieno wrote:I like those ideas too! And yes, it would definitely be a lot harder. Detecting someone's playing style/personality and turning it into an NPC personality equivalent would be difficult to say the least.
it could be tied in with your reputation in certain factions and the personality of those factions.

Re: Pareidolic Icons

Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2014 11:33 am
by Cornflakes_91
It could depend on your activity log

"destroyed 40 ships"
"Sold 40 units of cargo"

And such things

cross referencing with the personalities of the allied factions seems unreliable at best to me

Re: Pareidolic Icons

Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2014 12:14 pm
by Katorone
Talvieno wrote:I like those ideas too! And yes, it would definitely be a lot harder. Detecting someone's playing style/personality and turning it into an NPC personality equivalent would be difficult to say the least.
NPC have a personality and will equip their shop accordingly. The same goes for colonies, and probably factions in general.
This means you can use the equipment instead of the specific character to determine personality.

Re: Pareidolic Icons

Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2014 12:17 pm
by Dinosawer
Hyperion wrote:
Talvieno wrote:
Cha0zz wrote:With what I've seen in the last update, this idea seems suddenly very possible. ヽ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽ノ
That's the exact same thought I had while I was watching! I was planning on posting here immediately afterwards. Hyperion will be beyond pleased. :D
When he made those procedural icons symmetrical, I damn near lost a monitor... from nearly spitting out my drink, but seeing what Josh did in a few minutes, he could likely have the 2D version of the idea complete in a few hours, the 3D version might take a day... Or maybe just an hour more.

But of course when I mentioned it to him in IRC, he was silent as ever on the subject...
Not promising anything, but I'm currently practising my Python trying to implement a simple version of a 2D random pareidolic face drawing program. I don't think it's to hard to do really. ;)

Re: Pareidolic Icons

Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2014 1:31 pm
by Flatfingers
It may be worth noting there was some discussion a while back about the player having the same personality trait data structure as NPCs, and it would be determined by your in-game actions.

If that were a Real Thing, one of the outcomes is that you could let your character run for a while as an NPC. In theory, assuming you've played long enough, the NPC version of you would make pretty much the same kinds of decisions that you would make.

Another consequence of this might be that the specific numbers comprising your character's personality trait vector could be used as the input numbers to an icon generator. There'd be a 1:1 mapping of traits to iconic lines.

There are two practical issues with this:

1. Icons for player characters would not be fixed -- they'd vary as your "personality" changes through your actions. If NPCs need to be able to recognize you through your icon, that would be difficult if your icon changes. (Note: I'm assuming that NPC personality trait vectors never change -- that their actions are determined in part by their personality traits, and not the other way around as for human player characters.)

2. What does your icon look like when you just start the game, before your character has done enough distinctive kinds of things to produce an accurate version of your in-game personality type?

I don't think either of those would be show-stoppers, but they'd need to be addressed.

Re: Pareidolic Icons

Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2014 2:06 pm
by Talvieno
I addressed point #2:
What if it started as a neutral, dull gray, with straight, flat lines..
Edit: This just in, Hyperion disagrees with me on this. More information after the break.

Re: Pareidolic Icons

Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2014 2:11 pm
by Lum
I would split the "avatar" in two parts: the fixed one, and the data based one. That would make things easier to recognize NPCs without loosing the usefulness part. It would be like an ID card, with your photo (fixed icon) and your address, etc. (data icon).

One could think "hey, but if I have the numbers for an NPC, what I need those fancy data icons for?". Well, that's the tricky part: NPC's data shouldn't be public. Only the icon. And the data icon part, although based on data, should be more difficult to "read" than plain numbers...

Well, these are only some thoughts on the matter.

Re: Pareidolic Icons

Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2014 3:52 pm
by Hyperion
Talvieno wrote:I addressed point #2:
What if it started as a neutral, dull gray, with straight, flat lines..
Edit: This just in, Hyperion disagrees with me on this. More information after the break.
My disagreement is an aesthetic one. I think color saturation from white or black just looks better. However the aesthetics would also be determined by the background any icons are shown against.

I do like the overall idea of dynamic avatars, especially for the player, but I feel that the dynamism should be somewhat limited to perhaps color intensity, thickness of the lines, extremity of the curves, etc.

Having given the update another rewatch, it occurred to me that if the beads which make up the lines as I proposed were in fact glyphs, you could have a very visually interesting feature where the "beads" do not blend into one another like a line, but are squares or triangles, or even unicode characters. You could conceivably have a pareidolic face where the lines are in fact words or numbers or comprised of Chinese or Arabic characters. Lending the additional possibility of a face made out of poetry... Just a thought, but an interesting possibility.

Considering flatfingers first point. If we are going to be making data rich dynamic icons that convey information about the character, then I suppose they would recognize you by the seed which created the icon as your unchanging "name" while they would also be able to see directly what the information an icon conveys. If for the human player deep red conveys a high aggression rating, they don't need to see any red, they just see that you have an aggression rating on 0.81 and behave accordingly.

Re: Pareidolic Icons

Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2014 12:05 pm
by Keon
So I had some free time and needed to learn PIL, so I decided to take a shot at this. Image-Image-Image-Image-Image These are all procedurally generated almost instantly, with no code telling it where to put eyes or mouths, yet I clearly see bodies and faces in them. With a bit of improvement in the color scheme and how they are generated I can certainly see this happening in game.

I'll put the code on github when I get home, it's all python and done in about 40 lines of code.

Edit: Why not? Here's 20 more so you can get a better idea of what they look like:
http://imgur.com/a/ejrMt#4