July 05, 2005
Façade released
After 5 years of development, Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas have released Façade, their one-act interactive drama, under their new aptly-named shingle Procedural Arts. You can download Façade for free, or if you don't want to wait for all 800MB of it, you can order a 2-CD installer.
Those of you who haven't seen Façade yet are missing out. It represents the latest and greatest in AI-driven characters, dynamic drama management, and it doesn't give up any humanity in favor of pure technology (The New York Times recently called Façade "the future of video games"). You can read more about the technical details from our friends at Grand Text Auto. Congratulations to Andrew and Michael!via water cooler games Posted by brad at July 5, 2005 02:55 PM | TrackBack
Comments
no Mac version (yet) - arrgh!
Posted by: susana ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://interactive.usc.edu/nav-commenters.gif)
at July 5, 2005 06:19 PM
The ELECT team was given a demo of this at ICT last week, only to witness it execute approximately one contextually proper response to about 25 inputted commands. Hopefully that was a blip due to processor speed on the machine running it but I feel there is still a long way to go before natural language processing will be properly executed in games. 'Cause if this is the future of video games, we might as well stop now.
Posted by: noha at July 8, 2005 08:32 PM
Considering the complexity of this area, and from what I've heard from actual professionals in this area, this is a pretty good step forward along the long path that is natural language processing.
Posted by: brad at July 9, 2005 02:42 PM
some people like it
http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2005/07/05/facade-is-released/#comment-65727
Posted by: Bob Thomas at July 9, 2005 03:47 PM
I am delighted by this program - I've been leaving Facade running for hours on my system here, letting them talk and only once in a while prompting or hugging them. They actually ejected me from their apartment for hugging too much!
The only drawback is the subject matter - it gets me a bit sad listening to them fight so relentlessly!
A funny thing to notice - the choice of names includes a number of game theory luminaries - when was the last time you played a video game where "Jesper" or "Gonzalo" where default choices? Nice work!
Posted by: Justin Hall at July 10, 2005 12:01 PM
Played and messed around for 30 min. I like the way they talk to each other and subtle emotion expressed by the facial animation.
However the interaction seems designed for this specific set up. I think there is still a long way to go on this path. In my opinion there are million ways of interactive storytelling. The one facade use is definitly a challenging one. I still believe people can find more effecient method in doing it.
Posted by: Jenova at July 10, 2005 03:38 PM
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