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Ok, I made some updates w/ different framecounts and framerates. Any c&c?


12 - On black background


Here are some other ones:

13 - On black background

14 - On black background

15 - On black background

This animated banner is supposed to be at the top of every page on my upcoming game website. I didn' use web-safe colors for it, so I'm wondering if it turned out alright for people with non-windows or non-internet explorer systems.



You can check it out on a black background (as intended on the site) here: Banner on black bg

Do you think it will work as a banner?

I find this stuff pretty amazing - especially "Inside the Bomb"

http://message.sk/abstractarium/index.html

Hehe - Jack Nicholson, there's a prophet for ya!

The thing is out of hand, but luckily most Muslim governments have decided to try and stop the riots. I guess the riots are hurting their own societies more than ours.

The Turkish government has offered to negotiate between Europe and the Arab world, and have already stated that an official apology from the Danish government is required to get anywhere in the negotiations. So I guess their diplomacy is pretty much over before it began, because they will not get this apology - how can the Prime Minister apologize for something he didn't do? he has already expressed his regret on the matter.

bspeers said some important things about freedom of speech, but I think just the fact that he can point to a top 10 of the most important censored stories, proves him wrong in saying that we have no freedom of speech. Of course the western media have their own agendas, in Denmark, where I live, it's pretty easy to link each paper to a certain political party's agenda, although some of them span a few, and I guess it's the same in most other werstern countries (except perhaps Italy, where Berlusconi is in charge of most media). Some papers are liberal, some are conservative, some are more red, and so on. And of course the papers (and other media) compete and apply different standards for what makes the front page and what makes it in the paper at all. The difference is that we HAVE different papers, and people have a choice of what to read. As bspeers said, making papers for the poor is unusual, probably because it's a bad business, but there are plenty of papers for "the little man", the "poor, but no so poor they can't afford the paper", so to speak. Even the homeless have their own paper.

In contrast, some countries apply strict control of ALL national media (at least they try), and they put up noisetransmitters to prevent broadcasts fro other countries to reach their population. Belarus, for instance, is doing that at the moment. And they don't exactly post top 10s of the most important censored stories either, because it kinda defies the purpose. The western tradition of a free press means that even torture scandals within the army are eventually exposed, something that it would be suicide to write about in a dictatorship.

So in my opinion, the freedom is there. You can stand up for your opinions and start a paper with any agenda you like, but you will have to justify anything you lay out as facts, and you must be prepared to face the scorn and caricatures that your opponents make up. And of course that may get very tough, if you have nothing but "faith" in your opinions.

So I think the differences are big enough that I will counter bspeers statement (that anyone who says we have freedom of speech is a hypocrite) with, as usual, a question: Does power sometimes corrupt? How do we make sure, that if the ones we put in power are corrupted by their power, at least we find out about it and have them replaced?

sorry, that was two questions. Btw. I think bspeers is doing a great job at pointing our attention to those censored articles, and I'm glad nothing is holding him back in doing so.

Yeah, so like maybe you should appologize to the bully to make him stop, eh?

No way, but bullies have problems, and talking it over with someone adult may have identified and eventually solved them. Maybe this bully was getting beat up at home or someting.

Teachers intervene? Very funny.

No, seriously. I got a kid suspended from school once, and after that perhaps he started thinking about his own situation before bullying me any more. At least he stopped. I'm not trying to say you did the wrong thing, I stood up for myself and for my friends like you did a couple of times, but it's a kids' and action heroes' way of dealing with problems. My point is that with so many nukes lying around, politicians should have greater concerns than the average kid on when to start violent conflicts.

Maybe physical bullying is preferred to verbal bullying in school, but to scale the example and say war is better than debate is just out of proportion, and perhaps that's where the thing goes a bit off topic, since I'm certain that that's not the point you're trying to make.

Isn't bullying a symptom of problems that we should try to solve rather than just keep pushing each other around? And how are we going to solve anything if we aren't allowed to speak our minds on the matter?

Couldn't your own bullying experience have been solved if someone (a parent or teacher) had interferred? It may have meant crying, showing weakness, having your perspective judged by someone else, reaching a compromise - the whole mess that is so painful to a kid's honor, but necessary in my opinion if we want a world that isn't ruled by ignorant (perhaps innocent) and brutal kids.

Chosing the fight may leave your honor intact, whether you lose or win, because you chose the hard way - but actually it takes a lot more guts to speak your mind, because in doing so you overcome your fear of (usually physical) retaliation, and show an amount of trust in your opponent . From my experience, most opponents come to appreciate such respect.

It really is a shame that I have came to the conclusion that violence seemed to be the only solution. Although to this day I will leave it as a final desperate attempt with anyone opposing me.

That's a tough one, but hey, kids fight. Most of them stop at some age, or agree on some kind of sportsmanship. Tennis was supposedly invented because a generation of young men were duelling each other to death, usually to settle disputes over insults. Tennis was seen as a more civilized way of settling the disputes. Maybe that's what we need. A new kind of Tennis?

Some kids, when they are bullied, decide to become very good at something. The violence that can be directed outwards in a fight, can be directed inwards and used to discipline yourself at some activity. Mastering some activity may get you self-esteem and get you somewhere where you can finally laugh at those petty insults you suffered along the way. A fight works pretty much the same way - if you win it, that is. And nobody wins a world war.

Whose fault is it when the crazy kid at school hits you for making fun of him? Is it his fault or yours for intentionally making fun of a crazy kid ?

It's the crazy kid's fault. Hitting is illegal, and making fun isn't - and that's obviously the best way around. Because "making fun" can't be defined, which you seem to just ignore. Why not give it some serious thought?

Kids are immature. Adults have to teach them stuff (like - "don't hit, even when someone's making fun of you - it will only make you appear crazy").

Now, no matter whether you come from a muslim or a western country, I think its in everybody's interest that you learn "hitting is crazy" before you become old enough to get involved in politics, because "hitting" is a pretty serious things in the nuclear age of politics.

This guy and his "we will defend our prophet's honor with our blood", on a political level, is as close to crazy as they get. He is not taking the future of mankind seriously, nor the well-being of his followers. Or do you think so? Give me one reason why the proposed world war would be a good idea? I think he's trying to sound scary, because he himself is seriously scared that his reign is about to be over - and some amount of selfishness tells him that the rest of the world will have to go as well. That's the old "I'll break the pencil rather than share it with you"-reasoning from this guy's school-yard.

Freedom of speech should not equal the freedom to ignore common sense, respect and understanding for other people.

If it were only possible to legislate about "common sense, respect and understanding of other people". But you can't, as long as people are allowed to define their own common sense. Any such law, in my opinion, would be idiosyncratic and probably outdated by the end of the week - but I'd be happy to hear your suggested phrasing of this law, on a level of "what words and doodles can be accepted in public debate".

In such a law, would anything that someone considers their "religion" be included? What about the church of the flying spaghetti monster? Should we respect their taboos, in case they make up some? Could the depiction of spaghetti become blasphemous?
http://www.venganza.org/

We can't make laws to prevent people from disagreeing. And when they do disagree, they should be allowed to make their statements normally - publish articles, write essays, make satirical drawings, preach their opinions in church, and protest in the streets in an orderly fashion. Actually, that's how our laws are made and sometimes modified - following a debate in parlament and sometimes in public, cartoons included.

If the muslim countries want their voices to be heard and our laws to be changed accordingly, they could start out by allowing a public debate in their own countries. In the least, these debates would assure that they come to the table with something better thought out than "agree-or-be-slain". Lifting censorship would also make it alot more obvious to the west, that islam is something that people want for themselves, rather than something that are forced upon them because the alternatives are illegal.

The walking is certainly exaggerated, but strangely - I like it alot. It's more interesting to look at exaggerated movement than an average sloppy teenager shuffling along, and it adds all kinds of weird traits to her personality - is she marching? is she on some program? Did she turn goth to forget her past in the Foreign Legion? or is she just trying to get arrested, walking like that? I can't wait to see this manic person in a game, i wonder how she talks and what she'd say, and what kind of super important "quest" she must be on 

Better, but you're still supposing that one has certain expectations towards the rethorics of ghosts, which may fit on your intended reader, but strikes me ass odd  :o

Wow, I like the new version a lot more - the tone is more consistent, the tension builds up slowly, along with the character description, and basically everything that happens makes sense to the reader.

Perhaps the question of whether the ghost can use the repaired axe is a bit confusing, but it works in terms of Richard clinging to some desperate hope that his cleverness prevents him from being punished. Which I guess it doesn't.

There's just one sentence where I think the narrator gets in the way of the story, by claiming to know what a ghost might say.

While this wasn't exactly what a ghost might say, it was close to what Richard, a fan of old B-movies, expected it to say.

It leaves the reader wondering who the narrator is, since he knows about ghosts for facts, which breaks the fictional suspense.

Better, in my opinion, to have Richard reflect on the matter himself. Like if he wasn't certain whether the apparition was speaking to him, or whether he made up its words in his own mind.

Good job

This rocks!Ã, 

- didn't Minimi have strong sad as avatar once?

Good job, keep it up.

A few things...

Spoiler

The first paragraph. For several reasons it doesn't work.

* You give away the unbelieveable, horrendous act as something that has already happened (makes it less interesting) and even say it is expected and usual (which is hardly true). Works better if you build up tension through the story.

* Is Richard's name really the most important thing about him? It illustrates his loneliness, but in a way that makes the reader laugh and think "sucker", where, since he's the main character, you may actually want to have the reader sympathise with him (for starters at least).

* Should lonely people "expect" to become axe-murderers? Or is this a joke? And why should the reader be scared by the story, when the narrator is at such a safe distance from the events that he cracks jokes about them? Works better if the narrator mimics the reaction you want to provoke in the reader.

* Small thing, but Richard's life can have "felt" long, but not "been" long, when he's still only in his teens.

[close]

Another cliche that keeps the tension up, is when there's never time for the characters to go mushy and kiss, whenever they try, they're interrupted - enemies arrive, something explodes, the walls cave in - these romance-breaking metaphors can actually be quite funny.

Babar, you write that there's no place in the world where freedom means the right to hurt another person. It's not true, and it can't be practiced, because people are hurt by sometimes the most absurd things, and it's impossible to avoid hurting anybody. There's no objective criteria. If you count in the lunatics, there's probably someone to be offended by anything that can be expressed. For instance, some freak tribe may invent and feel very intimately for an abstract notion of their own superiority, and be hurt whenever somebody points out that it only exists in their own imagination. And a common word in one language may be an insult or a blasphemy in another language.

So "hurting someone", for western legislation to deal with it, need objective criteria. Like someone being physically hurt, tortured, or lied about, in a way that it can be proven. And by these criteria, hurting other people is illegal. Whatever else people are hurt by, it's their own mess.

I'm using a similar effect in "Space Darling", the game I'm working on.

For real time battles (screenshot below) I have a scrolling starfield background, but it's actually implemented as a custom GUI where the background pic changes to create a scrolling effect. It's still slow on slow machines, but gives a very decent result on newer machines. And having the whole thing on a GUI that can be turned on and off and handled from the global script is perhaps easier than building a custom room for the functionality, although that may be a matter of personal preference.



(click to enlarge)


Your scene looks very 3d - and it's perhaps a little ambitious to build a 3d flight simulator in AGS. What kind of interaction will you put in the scene? battle, steering? a choice of where to fly to?

Hey Ginny, thanks for the interesting read.

About the experiment, the brain is highly adaptive to sensory percepts, it grows new neurons and synapses all the time, while others perish. I guess there's no way of having two identical living brains, even with the same DNA, because human percepts are different (unless perhaps two identical persons could exist at exactly the same place and time).

I've taken some courses in Artificial Intelligence, and one of the approaches to intelligent processing is building Neural Networks. These are simplified models of the brain (or tiny parts of it) where neurons are connected by synapses.

Much like the brain, neurons in the net will 'fire' (transmit their activating/eletrical pulse to their 'child-neurons') in response to stimulation. Each neuron has a different, adaptable firing treshold, and a so-called 'activation function'. Input to the network is tested at each input neuron, that transmits it forward through the net, altering it according to treshold and activation, and when the signal is passed on from the output neuron(s), the result can be tested against desired result, and all the values in the net can be automatically modified so that next time the output will more closely match the desired output. This is called training the network, and it is a very smart method for problems where you wanna generalize from some data or approximate a mathematical function.

Depending on the intricacy of the nets, they can be trained to solve highly non-linear problems. Like recognizing handwritten digits, solving equations or filtering noise from sound signals.

Sorry, here's a link where it's better explained:
http://fbim.fh-regensburg.de/~saj39122/jfroehl/diplom/e-index.html

I find it interesting that things like reflexes are actually hardwired into the nervous system - probably becauseÃ,  individuals without reflexes have proved unsuccesfull in evolution and so their genes haven't spread. I'm wondering what other things may become hardwired in the human body in the future if they prove as vital as reflexes have been so far.

About the soul, I really don't know. I believe life started by coincidence somewhere in the mud long ago, for no higher reason, and that it's only around now because it could reproduce and adapt along the way. Survival and mating instincts also have no higher reason in my belief, except they must be hardwired by now, considering how much survival and reproduction has gone on since we were at the amoebae-state.

In Artificial Intelligence, programmers often have to chose between 'greedy' and 'explorative' behaviours of a given intelligent agent. Greedy behaviour is always doing what seems the best at the time, while explorative behaviour is sometimes doing other things in order to learn more about the environment and discover better behaviours that may possibly make the straying more than worthwhile. In AI, the most complex intelligent agenst are goal-based or utility-maximizing, and they create an internal model of the important aspects of their environment in order to chose actions from all possibly relevant data. Guess this is how the sensory system evolved for humans as well, and that the brain is simply processing and storing the percepts, inventing new abstractions when seen fit - like the soul, God, justice, life-quests and so forth.

Speaking of God, I like Kierkegaard's proof of God's existence better than Descartes' (as quoted by Tuomas): Without God, I would be too grand in my own opinion.Ã, Ã, 

Thanks again for summarizing your lecture, hope you keep doing it.

SSH, the riots happened after republishing of the cartoons, but the official demands for an apology from the Danish government came before that. Our prime minister said he couldn't get involved in the case and have a diplomatic meeting with representatives from the Arab world, because the offense would have to be tried at a court and was not a political matter. This in particular offended the muslim representatives, probably because in their own countries the head of state is in control of the media and they didn't understand or believe in this difference, or in the concept of a free press.

Also, the cartoon is not personal. It's aimed at a historical person, and a lot of people chose to take it personally. Guess they are burning our flags to invoke the same feeling in us, which is just ridiculous. In the west, anyone who gets some public attention is prepared to have papparazzis and cartoonists make their best shots at them, which must be irritating, but which is inseparable from our political wish that all authorities should be occassionally questioned, just like they are at the elections. We see the reason in this, because without it, something like nazi germany may happen again. Same reason church, state, courts and police are separate institutions.