USC IMD:

Computing Quality of Life in Civilization IV

(Slideshare accidentally covered some text with smiley faces. To correct see large file.)

My Civ4 mod (a directed research with Peter Brinson) appeared at a conference "Games for Change" and a workshop "Logic and the Simulation of Interaction and Reasoning." Thank you, Tracy, for inviting me to demo at Games for Change. It's refreshing to meet fellow humanitarian developers!

About the mod: The original Civilization IV rewards imperialism through scoring the glory of the empire. I reprogrammed the game to score the health and happiness of the citizens. By adapting John Broome's extended quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), and responding to Derek Parfit's repugnant conclusions, I designed an ethical calculus that rewards restraint, diplomacy and art in Civilization IV. See the presentation and play the mod.

Of Civ 4, Thief, Plots, and Time Travel

Several smart theoreticians associated with artificial intelligence (and me, a designer) will be presenting papers.

Hear about:
How AI of Thief could be modified to incorporate belief about other people's beliefs.
How Civilization 4 was modified to score citizen health and happiness.

July 12, in Pasadena

Workshop: "Logic and the Simulation of Interaction and Reasoning 2"

09.05-09.15 Opening
09.15-10.00 Michael Young: "The Representational Challenges of Fictional
Worlds"
10.00-10.30 COFFEE BREAK
10.30-10.50 Amitabha Mukerjee: "Discovering symbols from interactions
- easier than explaining interactions via symbols?"
10.50-11.10 Nadine Guiraud, Andreas Herzig, Emiliano Lorini: "Speech
acts as announcements"
11.10-11.30 Break
11.30-12.15 Lenhart Schubert: "From generic sentences to scripts"
12.15-14.40 Lunch Break
14.40-15.00 Jos Uiterwijk, Kevin Moesker: "Mathematical Modelling in TwixT"
15.00-15.30 COFFEE BREAK
15.30-15.50 Rafael Pérez y Pérez: "Emotions in Plot Generation"
15.50-16.10 Ethan Kennerly: "Computing Quality of Life in a Social
Management Game"
16.10-16.30 Ethan Kennerly, Andreas Witzel, Jonathan Zvesper: "Thief's
Beliefs"
16.30-16.50 Break
16.50-17.10 Martin Magnusson, David Landén, Patrick Doherty: "Logical
Agents that Plan, Execute, and Monitor Communication"
17.10-17.55 Leora Morgenstern: "Traveling Through Time and Logical AI:
Toward a Formal Theory of Time Travel"

http://www.illc.uva.nl/GLoRiClass/index.php?page=8_2

If you're interested, for better rates, register by June 12, 2009 at http://ijcai-09.org/

Background Panorama 2

Happy New Year everyone!

Lately I've been playing with stereocards as the potential backgrounds for The Tree. After discovering the piece of Ash that we will use for the physical interface I started thinking about how we can use the largest ring - the one with the bark - to control the backgrounds (the environmental history). Today I created a background using the stereocards. I am experimenting with the idea that the backgrounds could be controlled by the largest ring - moving in a circle much like the smaller "memory" animations that would match up with the figures in the background.

Tree History Panorama

Rings - The Physical Interface

Today Gene and I found two slices of an Ash Tree.

We can make 4 or 5 rings out of the two slices. The diameter being between 12 and 13 inches.

These are beautiful pieces of wood. The rings are defined and the colors are rich. We also found two slices of maple - which is a harder wood - but the rings were not as strong and the colors muted. Hopefully the Ash will be strong enough to withstand the cutting process.

Tree Backgrounds

In my previous post I wrote about the physical interface prototype. Today I am working on the backgrounds for the animations.

I've been experimenting with different backgrounds. I've done some pinhole photography and some flat color and texture designs but none of them felt right. I started thinking about history a little more and the stories that exist in pictures from the past - particularly in stereo cards which document a wide range of subjects.

So, given that inspiration I went to the local flea market last Sunday and picked up a few. They tell some wonderful stories about trees, people, what people take from trees, the environment and war.

I did some basic tests with the animation I already had (the background images have not been touched up. Take a look at two versions.

Single Background

Double Background

My thoughts are that if I imitate the starting point of a subject in the stereo card image it will give users a guide as well as create a cohesive story between the backgrounds and and the animations that take place.

Here are two possible starting points.

Turpentine

Logger

I love this image because of the way the soldier is looking at the "tree." I wonder what he's thinking. And wouldn't it be wonderful if he got up and carved something into the trunk of the tree?

Solider

And what about projecting in stereo?

Interface Prototype

Today I went to visit with Gene, a friend and woodworker who is building the physical interface for The Tree. He created a three-ring prototype to figure out the best way to get the rings to move and to play with different types of wood. We discovered a few things during this visit.

1) It won't be possible to use an actual cross-section of a tree as the act of cutting apart and drilling into it will weaken the wood (most wood when used is cut length wise not across as I had initially wanted). We went to a wood shop and figured out that we have two choices. We can either use a piece of Baltic Birch plywood or a single piece of maple. The choice between the two is purely aesthetic. The plywood will have a more "modern" look and the maple could potentially be more organic feeling and looking. I am leaning toward the maple but have yet to make a decision.

2) The rings, the way they are currently put together, do not move completely independent of each other. This was a concern that Andreas had brought up when I discussed the original mechanics with him. Currently, there are ball bearing balls in between the wood pieces. It would require the user holding some rings steady while turning others.

Watch the video

This is of concern to me but also interests me. There could be some positive outcomes of this mechanic. Firstly, it would promote cooperation between users and secondly, it would force users to think about what they were doing before taking action. I won't know specifics until the prototype rings can control an actual animation which will happen sometime in January.

Andreas had made another suggestion which was to have each ring attached separately to the pole in the middle that holds the ring up with ball-bearings. The challenge with this is that the sensors would have to be far away from the circuit to which they are attached by long wires. I am worried that this will make them less stable. If anyone has any thoughts on this let me know.

3) 5 rings may be too much. The prototype is 3 large rings. I am considering keeping it at three or making it four with a fifth ring in the center which does not turn. As I finish storyboarding this holiday I hope to have a better sense of the right amount.

Gene at work in his shop:

The Tree

Over the past few weeks I've done a number of experiments to determine how the tree "sees." I created a digital pinhole camera and took a series of photographs then experimented placing inverted photograms onto the pinhole images. The effect is that of a "burn," much like a memory burned onto the tree's rings. Each burn represents a moment in time, caught in a silouette snapshot. Throughout this process I've continually thought about the affordances of the tree. I kept asking, "What does the tree control?" And I kept coming back to one thing, "The tree controls its memories."

The core idea is that the "tree" (in the form of you, or I) can control these various burned memories, placing them into its field of view - much like a stage - and the various memories will interact, irregardless of scale (which changes depending on the size of the tree when the memory happened). Animations affect change of the subsequent memories.

For example, if a mouse comes across a dandelion it bumps into it and the seeds blow away. The next time the dandelion is placed on the stage there are twice as many. If the mouse did not bump into it there would only be one the next time around.

The memories will explore the collision of cultures - plant, animal, human - and our effect and dependence on one another. There will also be magical moments, taken from stories and mythologies, that work their way into the life of the memory.

a Tree - Directed Research week 1

Andreas Kratky and I met last Friday to discuss the structure of my Directed Research which will focus on creating Experiment Cases related to my Thesis. These Experiment Cases will serve as technical and design prototypes in an effort to figure out what works and doesn’t work in experiencing the life of a Tree. The main focus of the Experiment Cases will be the senses that a tree experiences, from the scale of time to the sense of sight, to how sound is perceived.

Experiment Case #1, Play with Time. How does a tree perceive time? Fred Rochlin, a writer and performer, once told me that as you get older (he was 72 at the time) life goes by faster. As a young person one year of your life is a larger percentage of the whole – so it passes slowly. As you get older, a year is a much smaller portion of the whole and therefore goes by faster. If a Tree is five hundred years old, a few moments will pass in an instant and it’s memories might appear as fleeting thoughts or Déjà vu.

How do people interact with time as a tree perceives it? Can they move things forwards and backwards? Can they slow things down and linger on a memory? We can choose what memories we want to linger on, can a tree linger? How can that control be manipulated? What if a tree, whose memories pass by with such a quickness that it is hard to determine what is happening, can choose what moment to stop the flood of images and rest?

Experiment Case #2, Play with Sight. How does a tree see? Is it in color, black and white, shadow, texture? Trees have no eyes, but we know that you don’t need eyes to see, our other senses create images as well. What are the senses of the tree that make up an image? What is the visual eye through which the three sees? Do they see through the eyes that dot the trees trunk and branches? Do they see through their leaves? Up, down, front, back, everywhere. Does a tree see everything? If each leaf serves as a sensor to an image, are the images in duplicate like the sight of a fly or does the brain of the tree put the images together to create a whole? How does a tree see memory? The shadow picture – That shadow is the memory that lingers, there is meaning in the shadow.

Experiment Case #3, Play with Sound. Layers of sound. I want to have a series of audio files that start and stop depending on the movement of the tree and it’s environment. There are sounds... ants crawling on the tree, the leaves blowing in the wind and even external factors such as another tree being cut down. Those sounds I want to be created through instrumentation (as opposed to real audio of events). In Camille Saint-Saens Carnival of the Animals the instrumentation mimics the movements of the animals such as birds. I want to experiment with instrumentation that mimics the experiences of the tree. Then I want to layer the music, one sound on top of another. I love the instrumentation in Arthur Russell’s This is How we Walk on the Moon because of the layers that build through the piece.

Experiment Case #4, Play with Fabric. There has to be a divider that separates our world from the world of a tree. Andreas put it succinctly when he said the fabric serves as “a membrane between the two worlds.” The point at which you enter the world of the tree. I am drawn to, (I do not know the proper name) the carnival attractions where one puts their head through a hole and onlookers see you as whatever image is painted around that hole. A frog, a fish, a witch, a bird. If I take that concept and reverse it so that one would put their head through the hole and they would then be entering the other world, a black box or a dark room, like another dimension where you experience the life of the tree.

Notes on the experience:
Seasons and landscape changes
The colleagues of the tree
Umwelt of a tree
Potential meaning of how memories relate to eachother
What does the tree know?
Is it important what order these things happen?
How do I formulate the translation of the senses of the tree?
Sense of space? Above ground and underground The idea of growth

Notes on story:
Event A leads to event B and event B has to be the outcome of event A. We have to know why things happen.

Twitch Games and World Building (but not together...yet)

As usual, Here Be Dragons can be grabbed here.

I’ve been developing and filling in a number of gaps in my abilities, regarding procedural methods and other things. Now that I’ve finished the major milestone in my day job I have a little time to post what I’ve been doing aside from what I’m supposed to be doing.

On a few new games:
I've been working on a few smaller projects, for fun as well as a much needed chance to polish something for general use. The 80%/20% (the last 20% of a project takes 80% of the total time) is very true, and I've managed to avoid it for a while, so doing these smaller projects may help get me back into project completion mode.

The first is a shooter where you don't shoot. Instead you have a reflector (the blue circle in front of you, the equally blue critter):

The reflector takes any enemy shot and redirects it....

...hopefully back in their face.

This can make for some heated moments, as well as an interesting turnabout. "Bullet hells" can turn to your advantage. Being in the right place at the right time can devastate wave after wave of baddie.

Have the infrastructure for levels, bosses, and bullet patterns...classically, assets are the big time sink. I've been getting back up to speed on pixel art, and balancing random level generation.

Another game I've been tinkering with isn't as far along, but I do have a level system and minor agent behavior-Codenamed "Efpeyess":

Actually, I may use this code for a few ideas I have, a first-person game, maybe a few third-person ones as well.

Both of these games have a flexible enough method of level and critter handling that any variety of procedural methods could be used to generate worlds. How interesting they'd be depends entirely on how you go about determining the algorithims.

One idea I've been working on is multiprocedure (or metaprocedure, if you feel pretentious). The issue: People are excellent pattern recognizers. If you use only a single algorithm to build whatever you’re building, people will catch on quickly. A series of terrain maps that only use Perlin noise will all look basically the same. A series of mazes generated using the same math will blur together in the spectator’s eye. These algorithims are useful (in Perlin's case practically necessary), but probably shouldn't be used exclusively.

When you want novel content, you do NOT want them all to blur to a vague grey. One problem is that random numbers are designed to do exactly this. While you might want go statistical spreads when calling rand(), statistical aberration by definition makes something unique and novel.

One way to get around the “grey goo” is to mix and match different emergent and chaotic algorithms. The way you mix and match these algorithms, as well as how much you mix them can itself be determined by some chaotic element. One might mix the Perlin noise with Voronoi cells, to get labyrinth-like canyons in the middle of high mountain ranges.

One trick is to not use every method at your disposal every time. Things are usually awesome because they are rare-or at least not experienced repetitiously. A galaxy with planets that have an equal amount of every type of terrain will get dull fast. Some might be almost entirely mountains, others largely ocean (I’m posting this from such a planet right now), others might a plains punctuated by volcanic badlands-and few might have a healthy mix of various biomes.

For agents and architecture, the idea is the same. You should have enough coherency to be recognizable, but enough variance to be worth recognition.

Some of this I’ve been developing as I’ve been playing with terrain generation-I’ll probably go into a step by step process in a later post. For now, I’ll just post some of the results.

On Terrain:

I love terrain mapping more than any healthy person probably should. I'm currently experimenting with random terrain generation (and navigation) using a combination of Photoshop, Processing, and C++. The pipeline of experimentation is informed by my theory:

a) If I can do it in Photoshop I can do it in Processing, but dynamically.
b) If I can do it in Processing I can do it in C++, but faster.

It can go backwards when I want pretty pictures to show people (or print out):

The map created was tested in Photoshop, but I did not do anything I don’t know how to do, at least in principle, in Processing or C++. The shading is done using a Processing applet I did, which simply compares the height of the pixel to the upper left and shades accordingly. I use this trick for shading the 3D mesh as well. I found the algorithm online at GameDev.net, a lot of good return on minimal coding trickery.

Right now I’m mainly doing the simplistic (far, far too simplistic) height->color, although I have been experimenting with a “climate filter”, that tries to make more desert at the equator and more snow at the poles. It’s a combination of a simple gradient and Perlin noise. I added a subtle amount of it here, you might notice some snowy patches that aren’t on mountains, and some sandy regions inland. Like I said, it’s subtle, but when you try to do things with at least a touch of realism, subtlety is everything. If I do a more in depth post on the process I’ll show you some before/after pics.

By the way, the color isn’t bad, it’s iconic. I’ll be doing some better color schemes once I’m happier with the terrain-generating math.

One might see a few Voronoi-like canyons to the north and to the west on the map-these were blended in to the Perlin noise-based terrain. In flythroughs, they are by far the most interesting and recognizable places to go to on the map. This is, of course, relative. If the whole map had been largely Voronoi cells punctuated by Perlin mountains, the mountains would have been the major draw point for visitors.

At this stage I can funnel it into whatever build of Bushido I'm currently turning to spaghetti:

The next step, of course, is to update my work on the critters and cities that will be populating such wilderness.