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August 14, 2008
Of Interest 14/08/2008
- Gorgeous pictures of Afghanistan, taken in the 1970s and 2000-2003.
- I found this article on path finding in games interesting. I was amazed to see how broken path finding using way-points is, yet in my (quite limited) experience playing many of the games featured I can't recall running into any problems. It really does show that bar for good enough is quite low, at least for the casual gamer. I was also surprised that the better technique, a navigation mesh, isn't used more frequently. It is so simple.
- How much would you pay for an Olympic medal? For the Australian sports program, a bronze costs $15 million and silver or gold cost a cool $40 million. The (very limited) data suggests medals scale linearly with investment.
Posted by Noel at August 14, 2008 10:53 AM
Comments
Re point 2:
What surprises me is how afraid game debs seem to be of employing new techniques. Tthe rebuttals the author expected make these guys look positively backward...
...or maybe AI CPU budgets in modern games are really much smaller than I thought.
By the way, the Spore team recently released a bunch of demo programs that they used when prototyping various parts of the game. They're really interesting - there's a couple of cellular automata in there, a demo of the gravity model they use in space, and all sorts of other wholesome stuff. Now there's a deb team who aren't afraid of a new algorithm or two.
Posted by: Dave G at August 14, 2008 06:08 PM