gau_veldt

It's a meme.
Posted here so I don't make a liar of myself...

* Who are you?
* Are we friends?
* When and how did we meet?
* Would you kiss me?
* Give me a nickname and explain why?
* Describe me in one word!
* What was your first impression of me?
* Do you still think the same?
* What reminds you of me?
* If you could give me anything what would it be?
* How well do you know me?
* Are you going to put this on your journal and see what I say about you?
* Would you ever meet up with me?

The PTSD this policy from decades ago has caused is one of the reasons we have so much violence and poverty now. Obviously I am against it being mandatory to learn how to kill people.

Everyone will answer for his or her adultery on the Day of Judgement so such a person's notion of "knowing they won't get caught" is patently false. As for which gender is more likely I think it is somewhat even as it always "takes two to tango".

Marriage is incredibly important since it provides a stable basis for a new family to start. It has been shown over and over again that the children suffer badly when a marriage breaks down. The most prevalent cause for marriage breakdown is adultery. The math is pretty simple here. Just say "NO!" to adultery.

Buckley's, then tea with lemon.

Burger King burger jockey on night shift.
It stressed me out big time thus it's definitely not my line of work.

Well as a Muslim I am learning to ask Allah for guidance, then insh-Allah may He show me to the right resources for my needs and incline me to the best decision for His favour.

Wow such deep writers' blocks coming up so far since the start of Ramadhan.
Allahu ackbar!

This is my first Ramadhan meaning daily fast for the next 29 days or so.
As for cleansing, it's a regular part of Islam (Wudu/Ghusl) so, yeah, that too.
As things go it's about 5:30pm here and sunset (Maghrib) is 8:25pm so I've got about three more hours to go for today (Saturday).

BTW Ramadhan fast is a bit more than water and food.
One is also supposed to fast wanton desires such as anger, greed, lust, etc.

Well I've got a week break or so until I'm once again house sitting. In the meantime...

Reply to this meme by yelling, "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your journal and explain what they mean to you.

From animetor_lily:

RPG

The one form of computer game that I mostly play. Though the odd real-time strategy game (like Starcraft) is good too. My favourites include Wild Arms, Lunar Silver Star Story and Eternal Blue, Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger. I mostly like to see the story unfold as I play through.


Chibi

Simple little characters that evoke big emotions. Chibis make me think of all the times you hear those well-placed innocent statements you hear from kids that really catch you in your tracks and make you think. A chibi is also representative of me needing to get complexity out of my life (so I don't die of stress).


Moe

This is like the second part of 'chibi'. :D On the surface moe is those endearing characters you see in the difficult parts of Japanese textbooks or on those massively complicate Tokyo travel guides. :P But it is simply described as a means for triggering endearment and having it help readers (of a manga perhaps) attach to the characters, and thus the story that might otherwise be distant to many readers.


Anime Mayhem

My RPG project of which I'm am the only one working on it. Not by choice but so far I have no others to help consistently (not counting hired work like commissions). One day I'll get some people interested in it. http://rpg.animemayhem.com Eventually I'll be able to tell this story. Perhaps as manga at first until I get more help for making an RPG out of it.


MSN

The earth is far too large and is really good at keeping me isolated and away from people. At least MSN (and also IRC) is around to bridge those large expanses of distance. And you don't need to buy plane tickets, wait in long customs line-ups nor worry about who's going to sign guarantor (I don't know any professionals here since my former family doctor died to cancer) on a passport!

Well it finally decided to become summer here with going from near-frost at nights over the past few weeks to plus 25 (Celsius) days. 25 is more like the normal for July but it had a chilly start this year. The air conditioner is also starting to complain and the compressor sometimes ceases up and won't start (it'll dim all the lights in my apartment and try to start but then a few seconds later gives up, then the safety sensor resets and it tries again a few minutes later, rinse-lather-repeat). Hopefully it will work when it starts getting really warm but it is really looking like this one is on its last legs and I will be looking for a new one. I should get the right one this time (an indoor air conditioner than a window air conditioner I had rig a makeshift duct onto to work like an indoor one) with the right cooling output for the apartment so it doesn't overwork and burn out. Only catch is those air conditioners are up to $500 or so more than the $200 window unit I have. I really hope it works into August and September. It will make late August/September far less dehydrating for me during the light of day.

If there is one person or more on your friends list who makes your world a better place just because they exist, and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the Internet, then post this same sentence in your journal.

Just a short post to tell the world about the 0.1.1 release of Anime Mayhem WIP:
http://rpg.animemayhem.com/special/AnimeMayhem-0-1-1.zip (about 22.6 MB)

You'll need Blender 1.48a to play. The blender player will also work so long as it is also 1.48a based. With the mouse anywhere in the game scene after Blender starts, press P to play (it will play right away if started from blenderplayer).

Features:

New to 0.1.1:

1. Added Ariko. She is playable if you change the first message brick of GameInfo to have a To: field of ArikoBones instead of AyukoBones. No other changes needed. Eventually this will be entirely script (game) controlled.

2. World is larger.

3. More ouse controls have been added. Dragging with the left button pans the camera around. Drags with the right button will pan vertically (head up/down) but also turn the character. You can now hold the forward key (currently up arrow) and use the mouse (with the right button down) to steer and look up or down. Works very similar to World of Warcraft.

0.1.0:

1. Playable
Ayuko can walk and jump and has idle and blink animation.

2. Camera
Can zoom in or out with the mouse wheel

3. Minimap
Moves as she does.

Technical:

1. Character commands are proxied. It is trivial to have another completed character to move on command merely by copying Ayuko's existing logic bricks to the new object, then emitting an ActivatePlayer message to that new object (see logic bricks on the GameInfo [left of Ayuko in camera view] empty).

2. Other objects may initiate movement commands. Mainly this ability is for the AI so objects other than the player can do things too.

TODO:

(x) [cheapo ASCII inifinty symbol]: Waaay too much to mention easily.

The game's knowledge base has undergone a redesign to utilize a semantic network. This structure has more versatility for representing facts about the game and its world since it can indicate more than one kind of relationship between concepts and is thus better not only for fact representation but also for any AI automatons making use of it during the course of deciding an NPC actions and interpreting its environment.

You may view it from the project's development page.

This graph, by-the-way, is semi-automatically generated by a script I can run whenever the database changes so the knowledge base is up-to-date. Internally it's stored using a database engine in three tables (more details shown on the website): one for the concept nodes, one for the relationship link information and a third for keeping the actual linkages. As far as I can tell the schema is compliant with 5th normal form, perhaps even 6th normal form (a fancy way to say it's got high resistance to inconsistency of the data).

Three different kinds of links are visually shown in the graph. They represent the most common nature of relationships that could be compactly represented with different edge colours than with monotonous clutter and links that all look the same. The rose coloured links represent transitive relationships, that is, those where concepts linked in a chain with the same relationship (eg: a --> b --> c --> d) the relationship also applies to any possible connection of concept nodes along the chain (eg: a --> c, a --> d, and b --> d). The orange coloured links are not transitive so the relationship always stops at the target concept node (the arrowhead also becomes a dot as another visual way to suggest "stop here"). The blue dashed links are compositional relationships that resemble putting individual pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together to form the picture of the completed puzzle. They build up more complicated concepts in terms of simpler ones.

This is a site that assesses your political views in terms of actual issues rather than by specific parties or people at http://www.okcupid.com/politics.

You are a Social Liberal (70% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (13% permissive) You are best described as a: Socialist Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid Also : The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

Cold chill fills the air.
The winter solstice is here.
Time to don Long Johns.

The dot-bomb crash of March 13, 2000 is a major event since it is the start economic changes resulting in major saturation of the labour market for computer programmers. Ever more qualifications are now required for even the most basic of entry-level programming positions and bar will continue to rise for at least two decades until the new generation leave school and enter into other career paths. This makes it really, really, really hard to get any kind of work related to programming or IT, even on the side.

As seen on many other journals:

It's been a long time since I posted anything. It's like at some point life got in the way and when the dust settled I forgot I had a livejounral or something like that...

The project web site is up (actually has been for a while) at http://rpg.animemayhem.com and I have 7 of the 8 main characters done in the character section. I've been on and off doing things for various parts of the game varying from modelling the characters and world, to planning the major AI system. Much progress made but still lots to go. I've commissioned character art and various character referencing material (for me to do 3D modelling and personality studies for each character) but otherwise I'm still a lone soul on this journey so it's very slow going.

The plan for the AI is starting to take shape and looks like the following:

A knowledge base stores facts about the world in the form of symbols. The current incarnation of symbol may be seen on the development section on the project page. Symbols closer to the top are more general while ones deeper in are more specific. Each symbol may have a logical expression that asserts its application in terms of the world environment (so a 'darkness' symbol might be an expression asserting the light level of the actor's current environment is below some threshold). The provides a language for an AI agent (actor) to interact with the world.

The main part of the AI agent consists of a Markov Decision Process (MDP). MDPs are used in robotics to teach robots to perform tasks. Similarly the MDP of an agent does pretty much the same thing in that the agent learns to perform actions within the world.

What actions? Good question and this is where goals come in. An agent will have some set of goals at any time and is working to realize them. All possible goals are enumerated in the knowledge base. Not all goals are suitable to all agents in the world (the Knowledge Base list is an exhaustive list of goals for all agents). Goals available to an agent would depend on location in the world, timing and other environmental variables. Also an agent's persona might exclude otherwise possible goals (killing someone may be a possible goal but would contravene certain character archetypes [the so-called good alignments in other RPG nomenclatures]). An agent may break a main goal into many sub goals and work them progressively.

An MDP works by having an overseeing trainer indicate a reward feedback so this is where consequences of an agents actions are evaluated. The first consideration is persona and actions contrary to the agent's persona result in appropriately negative feedback. Actions suitable to persona (ie: In Character) have higher reward. Next consideration are active goals and sub goals. Actions that proceed to one or more goals or subgoals yield higher reward than actions that are neutral, contrary or interfere with goals. An action that accomplishes more goals is more rewarding than one that accomplishes fewer. The worse an action is in terms of overall goals the more negative the feedback. Persona is weighted so that a major out-of-character action is bad no matter how many goals would be achieved.

For the oversight process to judge character it needs to understand correlation between an action (or sequences of actions, over any amount of time) and aspects of persona. It's easy to see that the input for this comes from a highly variant and noisy world full of many, many varied actions and time frames are also quite varied so significant actions and time frames need to be identified. This can be thought of as a classification problem in which case a beast called a Support Vector Machine (SVM for short) may be used to pick out the significant events (including actions) in an otherwise noisy signal of all the world's events and actions. This SVM is usable by both the actor and overseer to understand what is going on in the world in terms of significant events and actions. It lets the overseer determine an agents actions compared against the agent's persona. It lets an agent observe another character (either a player or another agent or itself) and estimate a best-guess persona based on observed actions/events.

The final wrinkle are emotion vectors. An agent's emotion vector is considered by the overseer against its actions. An agent currently 'sad' should not be doing actions like 'happy dance'. The emotional part has rules for how emotion changes based on significant observed actions translate to emotion change of the agent's vector. The emotion evaluator also uses the aforementioned SVM to identify significant events/actions relevant to an agent's current and future emotion vector (and also couples this to persona so that 'good' characters feel bad when 'bad' things happen, vice versa, and everything in-between).


So that's the schematic of the AI system. One other challenge I may take on is to have a director. A director in this case is more along the lines of a movie director, if you consider the game's world to be a stage. So this director would be looking at everything going on in the world and find the best parts to tell a story with. Similar to agents, the director uses a SVM to identify significant actions/events (or sequences of actions/events over arbitrary time) and is rewarded (the director is a MDP) higher when the stories "cut" are better. I could use crowd sourcing to provide part of the reward for that one.

I'm not going to put the project back up right away but I'm going to try some internal (computer program) related ideas I have regarding player and NPC (non-player character) and/or inactive PC (player-character, inactive meaning the player character is not currently being controlled by the player of the game) interaction. The so-called "AI" in computer role-playing games (RPGs) has been a pet peave of mine from the early RPGs I played back when and notice even now in newer games that there is still a major need for improvement. If my research yields promising results I'll be able to use the results should I be able to reopen the project (all dependent on being able to get help for areas I do not have sufficient ability for such as art and animation (drawn animation as opposed to scripted scenes with the game sprites) to complete them on my own.

For now I'll just look into the AI and see what I come up with. I'd like to still think there are people still in this world willing to lend a hand to another.

Until I have money again (at least momentary) until bills and crap runs me dry again. As I mentioned before all the five-week months are not on GST credit months and the extra weeks are wearing me very thinly spread.

I want to offer a commission to eiher Wendy (http://chopaface.deviantart.com) or Jenn (bw-inc, http://bw-inc.livejournal.com) pending availablity and/or willingness for them to do work. They've been really busy lately and for Anime Mayhem I really don't want to add any more styles than I already have since there's already two and I still need sprite and map (pixelwork) graphics.

For those that may be interested I should point out that I offer web space hosting on animemayhem.com. Anyone with such space automatically receives an address looking like yourusername.animemayhem.com. If you have your own domain and know how to access what is known as the "domain name record" I can also allow virtual hosting so that www.yourdomain.com will refer to the same web space. My rates are negotiable, depending on need, and I can also offer additional services (like a database account) if needed.

I thing I should indicate is that I don't do actual appearance-wise design (I don't fondle with CSS or DHTML etc to make your page pretty). I rent the space for your content to reside and the bandwidth for making it available to the public. I will work on infrastructure (such as interfacing features on your site to a database account) on a case-by-case basis as commissioned work.

TERMS
Paypal:
  Right now this is unfortunately the only method I have for accepting payments at this time.

If you are interested of have any other questions please ask: brian [AT] brians-anime [DOT] com
Spam robots may be directed to sputnik@brians-anime.com

This year has been wacky. All the five-week months (months where I wait five weeks between pay periods) have decided to be on months other than the GST issue months. The result: very limited budget during those months and June is only just beginning. Sometimes I wish I could jump into a cryostasis machine for four weeks and wake up on payday but that would cost money too :(

Just can't win...