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Oh shoots, I figured it out.  The show and say area was hidden because the window had somehow gotten horizontally shrunken.  I expanded the window and it's fine now.  Thanks for the help, and Sorry!

I'm trying to figure out how to get characters to not say the dialog option but some other line in AGS 3.4.  I see in previous versions that you can just uncheck "say" to do this.  AGS 3.4 doesn't seem to have this.

Any help appreciated, thanks.

Nice start!  You might want to think about adding in some more texture to the cave walls?  Like random rocks/boulders sticking out, ridges, valleys, etc.  You can just throw down a lot of random lighter and darker parts, sharply contrasting to show jaggedy-ness.  It's a bit smooth for a cave, I think.

Fantastic style!

Really looking forward to seeing this come out.

I am a massive Aronofsky fan and would greenlight this project 100%.  Aronofsky's films to me are like the cinematic equivalent of poetry, or in Catholic terms, a priest's "homily".  Indeed, he starts many of his films with verse from the Torah or other religious/mythological proverbs.  ("Death Is The Road To Awe").  He has come out saying "The Fountain" is the closest thing he has ever produced that represents his personal spiritual faith.

What makes him a master is his use of metaphorical visuals and abstraction, often on many, many levels simultaneously.  In The Fountain, for example, visuals from medieval Spain, near-present 21st century biotech lab, and a far-future space voyage overlap in a spiraling, super-stylized manner.  You have the golden ring, the golden nebula wrapped around Xibulba, and the golden vale around the Spanish queen all representing a kind of Midas-like, mis-placed obsession and aspiration.  Things that consume the many versions of Thomas, and lead him astray from the truth -- symbolized by the white supergiant, the Queen's white face, the white cancer-patient wrap which she is clothed at toward the end, the white sap of the tree.  The visuals blur and intertwine with one another like the spiraling of a Rabbi's speech, connecting seemingly disparate material (ancient history, biotechnology, sci-fi space voyage) into a cohesive tapestry of meaning.

I am of the eternal opinion that Aronofsky does not receive the credit he is due, in part because of the fact that the average moviegoer is not looking for, or perhaps can't even really "get" what Aronofsky tries to accomplish.

The point-n-click adventure game audience though is a much more niche, and I think comes to the table (or the laptop screen) looking for something deeper than a fun romp to munch popcorn to.  So I think this could really play out well.

I personally think a lot of cyberpunk and sci fi material is inherently deeply philosophical ("What does it mean to be human?  What is consciousness?  What is the best way to organize human society?  What are the impacts of technology on the human species?  Can we have God in a machine?  What would that God be like?")

I would say though, that you might take any given biblical story and try to retell that in a different setting, as a jumping-off point.  Aronofsky's Noah, for example, does this.  Perhaps take something from Genesis (Adam & Eve) and play with potential settings / ways of telling this. 

Thanks for the interest and kind words Frikker and selmiak!  I'll let you know when we're ready for the broader playtesting phase.

Here's another (brain) teaser for you Philosopher Kings and Queens.  I feel this image kind of encapsulates the "Big Picture" themes of Neofeud fairly well.  What makes us human?  What life forms should be considered to have human-like rights and priveleges?  What will AI be like when it literally "Hit's the streets", as in, walks down the street and gets hooked on meth and Angry Birds?  Is it justifiable to throw some under the bus in the name of accelerated progress?  What do we as a society do with our "defective" -- mentally unsound, lazy, criminally inclined -- people?  Should we do anything?



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The applicant will also be required to produce proof of citizenship with photo ID in addition to:

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Hi all,

I'm weighing the best method of implementing a scene with many characters and was wondering what the veterans would recommend in order to minimize pain and performance degradation.



Many of the characters pictured in this particular scene will not be interactable initially, so I think it's ok to have a lot of them not be AGS character entities.  I would however like them to have some basic animation such as fidgeting, blinking, tapping a foot, just showing that they are indeed alive (relatively speaking) and not completely static in the background.

I'm thinking:

1.) Have an animated background loop?  One issue I guess is the resolution of the game is 1366x768 so this could bloat the install file.

2.) Have them as objects playing an animation loop?

3.) Make each one a character playing an animation loop?

4.) ?

If anyone has a suggestion how this might be handled best, let me know.  I've never done anything on AGS that pushes the limits of the engine so might be good to know where things might start overheating before I break it.

Thanks

SilverSpook:

I was vastly entertained by your posts in this thread. I was shocked at times by the way your theological and political points popped up suddenly but I was also relieved when you reined them back in to make cohesive points further along the line.

You seem to have a great talent of being able to write constructive and yet controversial articles that will get people thinking on the real heart of the matter.

You also seem to have the rare ability to take rather curt blows from critics, maintain your composure and reply in a sensible and (again) thought-provoking way.

Thanks for your own and everyone else's long-reads in this thread. I belong to a self-confessed "nerd-herd" of friends in real life and we often discuss exactly these kinds of topics, and you guys have given me some great material to bring up next time (credited of course).

I had my own interesting (to me at least) idea about an AI suddenly becoming self-aware in an autonomous robotic tank being tested by the military (Yeah...I'm aware of "Short Circuit". I know it's not the most original idea ever ). Of course I saw the story as having adventure game possibilities and so I think I might keep the full story to myself just for now...

I'm flattered you found some value in my mind-excretions!  I do honestly put a lot of thought and passion into this topic(s).  I was considering becoming a cognitive-computing (that was the hot hype in my day) PhD at one point.  My father is also a hippy almost-Jesuit theologian (Yes, we're a family of quitters, but I intend to change that with Neofeud!).  I spend a lot of time talking to him, so that colors things

I definitely like your premise for your game, Mandle, and I think it could be original if wrapped up in a point-n-click adventure game and massaged a bit   A lot of times the uniqueness comes from just changing the "camera angle".  District 9 for example is just an Apartheid fable.  But it's the way everything plays out -- the Aliens trappings with the hyper-real, unmistakably Blomkampian shanty land, the choice of bureaucrats and destitute poor as main characters, these details and stylistic nuances that makes the movie a brilliantly original work.  (/OT)

Sorry if my post felt lateral, but personally, I find God to be inextricably political, and discussions of super-intelligence to be inextricably theological.  Many atheists would say, indeed, that God was created as a form of mass-population control, an "Opiate of the masses" as Marx put it.  The all-seeing judge and arbiter to quell disputes, the universal therapist mediated by the priest's confessional onto which all anxiety, pain, guilt could be cast, the ultimate answer to dangerous probing inquiry.  "God was a dream of good government," to quote Deus Ex's (oh the irony!) Morpheus, the proto-messianic version of Eschelon IV channeling Ion Storm's writer Sheldon Pacotti.  And, to quote the thread title, "Will It be A Nice God?"

I was playing fast-n-loose with the "AI is horseshit" comment, in the context of the rant.  As a game designer I program AI into my little aggregations of 16-bit .PNG (or vertex-shaded apparitions of tesselated geometry as the case may be in a 3D game), so I would take offense to someone calling my nerve wracking code-work "horse shit".  Like you've already pointed out, a lot of postulations and predictions in the article on AI, if not outright horse feces, deserve a grain (or maybe a barrel) of salt.  To be fair, I think 90% of everything is horse shit. 

So to achieve consciousness in a computer, we might want to (or have to) endow it with similar instincts. This could be done in various ways; we could try to specifically encode them into the pathways of its brain, or if we use an evolutionary algorithm to progress from simpler "brains" to more sophisticated ones they might emerge from the context of the "game world" by natural selection.

I'd say it follows then that it's impossible to create a "Nice God", game-set-match.  We try really, really hard to create "nice human beings" through our bizarre McDonaldized and failing child-rearing system called public education, smartphone-babysitters, and often overworked and/or absent parents.  Results are heavily, heavily mixed, as evidenced by the non-zero crime rate and the fact that the Greatest Minds of Our Generation having brought about the near-total financial collapse in order to float their 50 yachts and Malibu timeshares.  Oh and there's the little problem of all those wars and poverty and utter devastation of the planet and all that. 

This is what I love about Chappie -- it takes into account the fact that it's possible we won't know where/when true AGI will manifest and that when it does, if the "wet" human organism is a model, essentially a homo-sapiens brain on NOS with 800 IQ, then infant AI will respond to whoever and whatever teaches it.  That could happen to be the supergenius computer nerd with his utopian ideals of a "poetry writing, art-loving, peace-promoting" super AI as portrayed by Def Pattel.  But maybe the machine Child-God is born accidentally into a South African favela, or an American ghetto, some other wasteland at the exhaust-pipe of Capital-C Civilization.  Maybe the future God Machine gets taken in by a couple of "Zef" gangbanger foster parents, gets raised to swag and wear gold chains and pop caps in asses, hustle meth on the streets, and do "the heists".  Gangsta God.  Maybe they will be torn, like all young adults eventually become, between the many future selves that they could be, hit those crossroads that all human 21st century teenagers hit -- career criminal fighting for the Bloods / Cryps?  An upstanding future office worker?  A world-changing Silicon Valley entrepreneur?  A selfie-addicted aspiring movie star?  An otaku solipsistic gamer who never leaves the basement?  Who will the superintelligence grow up to be -- Elon Musk?  Pol Pot?  Mother Theresa?  Charles Manson?   

We don't know who our children will be when they grow up, -- though we hope for the best -- we never really know.  All of Google's Big Data, billions in psychology and sociology research, Oxford philosophers, Berkeley neuroscientists and Moore's Law in the world can't tell us that.

As Future of Humanity Institute founder Nick Bostrom put it, "Each time we invent a new technology, we pull a ball out of a bag.  Sometimes the balls are black, some are white.  Some will hurt or help us, we don't know till the technology arrives.  Superintelligence will be perhaps the biggest ball, and it will likely determine our the rest of our existence, or non-existence."  I lean towards the opinion that we won't know who the Deus ex Machina will be, until we "Make our God with our own hands".

Perhaps we should put Artificial General Intelligence on the backburner for now until we debug the problems with Human General Intelligence, and the society that produces it.  (Hint: Probably won't happen!)

So I do hope not to derail, but to perhaps widen this topic of AI and superintelligence.  Indeed the question of who AGI becomes, and how they become, is a central premise of my AGS game Neofeud.

Neofeud progress is supercharging faster than Tesla Powerwall sales! We've taken Elon Musk, Mars colonizer / world saving alt-energy guru extroardinaire's advice. "You have to put in 80-100 hour weeks. You have to get done in 6 months what the competition accomplishes in a year." Because that is the approximate time-horizon of Neofeud: 6 months. (off-the-record! We're not vaporware but don't hold us to that release date!)


"If you want a cyberprosthetics job done right you've got to it yourself!"

That's right, we're talking sustainable DIY cybrogery here. Upcycling Nintendo gamepads and picosatellite dishes into interactive minigames to do Lucas Arts proud.

We're giving you the quality brain-juice puzzles, taste-the-rust gritty cautionary dystopia, and copious (though hopefully not annoying!) pop/mid/high-brow cultural references from Terminator to Brazyl to please your inner 12-year-old SNES-nerd, your inner 20-year-old cybergoth Philosophy major, and your outer 32-year-old IT administrator with ADHD toddlers and overbearing middle-management bosses!



An unemployed disaster-response robot waits in line for welfare, battery-stamps, and Section 8.

Trying to make the robot's tentacles appear as though they consist of a piezoelectric polymer (or some sort of artificial muscle failing that). He's supposed to be kind of an all-terrain post-earthquake rescue machine, fully automated and sentient.

And yes, he is allusive to the Matrix intentionally


Speaking of Elon Musk and space tourism, here we have Murdoch Beach. The arcologized resort in the background is one of the many exotic neofeudal arcologies accessible by orbital hypersonic jet in Neofeud.

In less figurative news: we have about 10-20 minutes of fleshed out gameplay at the moment and hope to recruit some testers to try out a short playable demo of Neofeud.  Stay tuned and drop us a line if you'd be interested in helping out with focus-grouping and feedbacking on Neofeud!

No, not a Star Wars game.  It does have a lot of robots in it, though!

I share the skeptical view on AI, and agree with Andail's points on the importance of the psychology of superintelligence.  I think the same goes for the psychology of human intelligences.

I personally like Jaron Lanier's (You Are Not A Gadget) take: "The problem with the Turing Test and AI in general is it's impossible to tell whether the machines is coming alive or you're dumbing yourself down to make the machine appear smarter."  A lot of times, AI researchers and especially "Singularitarians", "Transhumanists" and the exceedingly wish-fulfillment oriented end of the spectrum can be like the gold-star-happy, helicopter-parent that gives their child a trophy after every finger painting, whether it's Van Gogh caliber or just feces smeared upon the upholstery.  "You beat reigning world-champion Kasparov at chess!  Amazing job, Deep Blue, you mountain of IBM silicon and C code!  See, US government and especially Pentagon?  IBM is still relevant!  You can't gut our funding just because we're a dinosaur being outmoded by Prodigal son Bill Gates and Nerd-Jesus Steve Jobs, we're making strides in AI!"

AI is the fountain of eternal marketability.  Like The War On Terror, but with less drone bombings of Afghani hospitals.  "911", "Bin Laden" and "Saddam's WMD's" were pretexts to get the US government to fork billions of dollars into weapons manufacturers, Halliburton, and WMDs under the superheading "War On Terror" whose victory was by definition undefinable.  How do we know we've won "Teh Terror?"  When all under-resourced brown people with towels on their heads and dead relatives from the shrapnel of submunitions collectively put up a white flag and "surrender"?  The War on Terror was a marketing thinktank fabrication, a brilliant one, to justify endless war, along with all of the civil-liberties infringements, war profiteering, and reduction of FBI attention to Wall Street/white collar crime that entails.  Ultimately, the term is kind of meaningless; it's just a lot of bombs being thrown around, and it doesn't really matter who at: because it's just about putting gasoline into the engines of the military-industrial complex. 

Similarly, you can get the government or Ray Kurzweil and his billionaire-philanthropist-playboy-sci-fi-nerd acolytes or Google (Google University) to cough up billions of dollars into your nerd-job-security if you lump all of your development under "Artificial Intelligence", "Super Intelligence", or whatever hot buzzword off H+ and Wired.  I think it was Bruce Sterling at a recent Lyft conference who pointed out that AI in a nutshell is Marvin Minsky asking the government for a ton of money to work on the blueprint laid out in Asimovian science fiction, claiming he was going to build a neural network that works "Just like the brain!" and kick the problem in a decade.  Then, 40 years goes by, and eventually the supercomputer gets pretty good at recognizing "red notebook", "yellow spoon", or "camouflaged Jihadi bunker", and the spin-off tech that isn't actually AI but some small peripheral thereof, gets shipped off to make guidance systems for drones, CCTV surveillance algorithms for hastening Big Brother, or whatnot.  But the ever elusive "AI" remains unachieved, perpetually.  Hovering forever just out of reach in the collective unconscious, a mirage, hologram-lit by a hundred Terminator, Robocop, Battlestar, Ex Machina films et. al., watering the imaginations of non-techie but blockbuster-consuming senate sub-committees looking for somewhere to throw billions of dollars.

Another phantasmic civilizational engine is God.  You could ask a similar question, "Is God a nice God?".  Like "Winning the War On Terror" and "Building AI", "God" is a massive, multi-billion dollar industry -- in the Catholic Church alone it's At LEAST 170 billion yearly, according to the Economist, and that's not counting the credit-default-swap money laundering crap festering in the Vatican Bank right before they brought Pope Francis in for a facelift.  And also like these other two activities, God is empirically nebulous; you can't prove one way or the other.  You don't know if you're actually receiving a revelation from God or you're just an apopheniac projecting Jesus' face in your Dominoes pizza slice.  To rephrase Lanier, "It's impossible to tell whether it's a miracle or you're just dumbing yourself down because you want to feel God is there."  At the same time, like AI, God provides some benefits, like helping people cope with death, betrayal, hopelessness, binds together community, feeds and shelters the homeless.  Lots of crap might be attributed to God too, like the Inquisition, extremism.  The point being, it's a mysterious, invisible entity with a powerful and very tangible effect in the real world.  They share an extremely purple Venn Diagram, God and AI.  Which is why Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross called their book, "Rapture of the Nerds", and possibly one of the greatest cyberpunk games of all time is called, "Deus Ex".  Perhaps AI conferences are the Mass of the geeks, Kurzweil's Enya-soundtracked powerpoint of exponential curves and post-human beings are the new stained glass, the keynote speeches by Minsky are the priest's homilies.  Perhaps AI research spin-off technologies like expert systems for hospitals are the nerd's Catholic Charities and missionary work.  That would make the Predator drone the Nerd Rapture's Inquisitioner.

So AI is horse-shit, but is it necessarily a bad thing?  Probably not; as undefinable pipe-dreams go, there are worse.  Making a Jeopardy-playing robot that ends up being re-tooled into an NLP healthcare diagnosis assistant and recipe generator (I particularly like Austrian chocolate burrito)   Sure, the self-driving cars and self-lawyering lawyer bots and the incoming real-world Baymax are probably going to throw millions of taxi drivers, truck drivers, pizza drivers, paralegals, lawyers, nurses, doctors, out the window and onto the street in a breadline.  AI-research will break the Marxian tipping point -- when techno-destruction of jobs exceeds technology's generation of them.  There will be unrest and hand-wringing and people striking in front of McDonald's and Occupy 2.0, but ultimately, after a lot of soul searching, we'll come to accept a post-job, basic income world. 

At any rate, the process of attempting to manifest super-intelligence is probably a better activity, civilization-wise, than trying to foster Les Miserables-grade dystopias across the planet as a kind of antagonist-generation mechanism.  Just so we can keep pumping out M4A1s, RPGs, and Reaper Drones to kill the angry Jean Valjeans and/or clandestinely fence them to the warzones and let the economically devastated (by our sanctions and vulture capitalists) kill each other off.  Yes, it maintains job security for tens of millions of ex-NASA engineers. It furthers tech-innovation, gives Anon mouthbreathing hackboys a sense of purpose and gets them out of their parents basement (to counterhack the Chinese at Airforce Cybercommand ).  War puts would-be wife-beating, black-kid-shooting jarheads in Fergusson Missouri into fatigues, 8,000-square-foot homes and more importantly, a life-phase better than a terminal career-Wal Mart receipt highlighter and racist, womanizing loser.  But it's still war, and war is hell.  With AI, at least there's a chance it won't be a war, despite the holograms that Hollywood's Age of Ultron and ilk are projecting.

I like the visor concept.  Yes those blue dot's on the telescoping cylinders are eye-like apparatuses.

Thanks for the suggestions Frikker and Mandle.  I like the point about the uplink satellite and the laser gadgets, etc.  It is supposed to be allusive (is that a word?) to the Matrix partially.



Updated version.  I tried to rub in the polycarbon-grey Festo-style muscles to give it a bit more realism and it's a bit more Matrixey Sentinel-like.  Working on the winch concept, at least some door that could potentially be the compartment exit for the winch.

What I want here is to make the robot's tentacles appear as though they consist of a piezoelectric polymer (or some sort of artificial muscle failing that).  The  bot I'm thinking was originally intended as some sort of all-terrain disaster-response bot, so if anyone can think of pseudo-engineering components or design ideas to augment this dude with it would be much appreciated.

Kind of open-ended here but basically I've blown a lobe-gasket running on creative fumes and want the guy a bit more believable, interesting, or both if the two aren't diametrically opposed.



EDIT: Sorry forgot pic.

Thanks for the input all.  I guess I'll just send out builds to a select group of testers just to get some feedback on the game for now.

Thanks guys, and yes I've already preordered Technobabylon.

That sure does 'splain a lot then!

I'm late to the party but mind=blown!  The video reminds me of David Firth material (Fat-Pie.com)  Uber creepy!

The Neofeud images are painted in Photoshop for the most part using a Wacom Intuos tablet.  Not actual physical paint-on-canvas, if that's what you mean!  Thanks for your interest!

Ah, that makes sense.  Thanks.

I think what I was really thinking of is a method of instantiating objects from a template.  Which provides 1.) Time savings on placement of objects 2.) in the case that you modify a parameter of the template, changes would propagate to all instantiated objects.  (As in Object-Oriented-Programming C++/C#/Javascript objects). 

Perhaps it's not really extant/feasible/reasonable in the context of AGS.