alanschu

Yup, things are looking up!

Daryl Katz has purchased the Edmonton Oilers.

I think I am pulling for Katz. The biggest investors of the EIG all feel that Katz' offer is best for them, the team, and the city. In the end, Oilers get a stable owner (not that the EIG isn't stable), but also one that is an Oilers fan, and the EIG investors get a healthy compensation for the risks they took a decade ago. It seems the splinter group that wants to keep the team are a bunch of smaller investors, and a bit of me thinks that they don't want to give up their stake because they like saying that they are owners of the local pro sports team.

Lots of drama surrounding the Katz offer and the Butler-Gregg scramble to maintain ownership here in Edmonton.

Here's hoping his last hurrah is better than Raul Julia's (Street Fighter...ack!) In a morbid way, I can see a solid performance in The Dark Knight catapulting him into permanent cult icon status, because of the timing of his death.

I doubt it. Lots of movies have been released after the death of a starring actor.

There was one I really enjoyed for a bit called Desktop Tower Defense that was also great fun.

I in fact have stated on numerous occasions I would be willing to do just that (kill to have either of them on my team....murder spree if it will get us both!)

EDIT: I later realized I don't care...

Wasn't this used before? This approach, like statistical learning for some other kinds of programs, seems pretty straightforward and a logical thing to implement for AIs. I hope I'll get some academic insight into this topic soon at the University... Machine learning isn't a new thing to do. The way it was done in this demo was different though. Lets say you have a group of characters that you want to respond differently to Creature X and Creature Y. You set them to follow you in the game itself, enable learning, and then attack Creature X with base attack. They will now use base attack against creature X. If you use alt attack, they will now use base attack and alt attack roughly 50% of the time. Use a lot more base attacks, and they will do primarily base attacks, with the occasional alt attack. Bump into Creature Y, and it will use your normal attack scheme. Start doing magic attacks against it though, it'll use the more specialized learning (for Creature Y) as opposed to the general learning (for all Creatures), so against Creature Y, it will favour magic attacks. All in the span of a few minutes, rather than taking time writing AI routines yourself. While this could be used in a shipped product for people to create armies that attack the way they want it to, it seems it's more used for a development to speed up AI implementation. Once the creatures are behaving the way you want them to, you disable their learning and go from there. This is a bit different than "traditional" learning, because they are purely mimicing you. If you just stand there while a creature wails on you and they have not learned any course of action, they will just stand there and get killed.

I went to AIIDE 2007 as part of my work. It was pretty interesting, though much of the commercial stuff I saw involved more procedural animation type stuff. I did enjoy Nathan Sturtevant's presentation about pathfinding. It's more of a technical thing, but it was about using some good heuristics and whatnot to make realtime pathfinding accurate and fast...two things that are sometimes at odds with each other. David Thue had a great talk about his interactive narrative. He gathered some statistics and created a few different archetypes for what type of game players play an RPG game, and based on the player's past decisions, utilizes machine learning to allow future quests to be presented in such a way that is geared towards the player's play style. It was pretty interesting to watch the presentation he gave on it. There were some cool learners demonstrated to allow for creative ways for game developers to create AI for characters (nothing too complex though) simply by having them mimic the actions that you (the developer) do in certain situations. This would cut down on development time for creating AIs. It didn't seem too complex, but it was demoed in real-time, so it's clearly efficient and easy to do. The same people also demonstrated some tools to assist in development for the Wii remote, to allow for significantly more complex motions to be captured and have actions assigned to them, in a VERY easy manner. Most early generation Wii games don't have significant motions programmed because it was very hard to do. This lets you cheat at games in ways, once you find out the base motion that the game is looking for. The new tools would more easily allow similar (but still distinctly different) motions to be more easily used and have them represent different actions in a game as desired. From a developer standpoint, it looked :) I really enjoyed the majority of the talks. Though Soren Johnson's was interesting to me (a n00b to AI), it was a bit too basic for most people there. There, however, is where he pointed out the significant difference between AI in games and AI in academia. In games, the AI has to be fun. In academia, the AI must be good. And good doesn't always mean fun. Hence, AI's in lots of games "cheat" and stuff like that to provide challenge, or are not as good so that they aren't too dominating. It was a fun time though.

You sound surprised.

I remember in the late 90s I had a Netscape Install for the odd website that didn't show properly on IE. Now, I'm a Firefox person, even at home (where once I was too lazy to bother). If Google were to make a browser, I'd probably be all over that!

XBOX360 version?

Well then, Jedi > *

Vader should dominate all, except Yoda. "May" have met their match? They don't stand a chance!

You can get more with a kind word and a gun, than you can with just a kind word.

Meh, my roommate and I both enjoyed diablo, and we're having fun with Hellgate. I'm having fun upgrading my weaponry and making new mods for them.

I picked up Hellgate: London so I could play with my roommate. It's fun going full auto as a marksman and annihilating the denizens of hell in large numbers.

Some dude named Jeffbuhl tried ganking my friend and I (I'm level 49 rogue, she's level 50 paladin). He was ?? to both of us, but with only a normal mount, so he couldn't have been too high. When we first saw him we waved and he waved back, the typical non-hostile gesture. Then once we started fighting tar beasts, he stealthed and came and killed us. Big man! So, then he decided to corpse camp the living crap out of us as well. We finally just outwaited him after he killed us a few times more (we got him once though!!). So, we're busy killing dinosaurs, then I see him and I scream to my friend "Our Friend is back our friend is back!!" I quickly stealth, and he sees her and goes and attacks her. I cheapshot him, and do my best to stunlock. She gets off her bubble just in time before she dies, and we end up killing him. We quickly heal up and bandage and he respawns and runs right for her, so I stunlock him and we smack him around hardcore this time. He even tried sprinting away but unfortunately crippling poison prevented him from doing that!! Muahaha. Now we're both pretty low and health, and the graveyard isn't too far away, so we don't have much time. He respawns and we fight again. He is able to just get me as I Coldblood Eviscerate him for 890 damage, at which point my friend uses Holy Wrath and instantly kills him since he was low health. I quickly run back to my body and as I revive, I see my friend engaged in combat. She doesn't have her bubble, and he's kicking her butt pretty quick. I get off a cheap shot, then a Kidney shot to keep him stunned. My friend is inches away from death, so I decide to vanish, so I can get off another cheapshot once the kidney shot wears off. In the end, we killed him 4 times, and he got me once. The final time he respawned he sprinted away, running home to mommy. We figured he actually ran away to heal up so he wouldn't be at part health when we fought, and as we mounted up, we saw him trying to come after us. We figured we had had our fun, so we just carried on and returned to Marshal's Refuge. Yay us! Felt good to get him back 4 times after the punk decided he was cool enough to corpse camp people at least 11 levels lower than him. Our friend: http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.x...&n=Jeffbuhl Me: http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.x...hj&n=Jorian Paladin Friend: http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.x...hj&n=Alegna

Just got the Burning Crusade for Christmas, so more WoW for me. Since the rest of my friends aren't so able to play at the moment, I am taking a break from questing and just doing copious amounts of PvP.

Yeah, I'm a rogue and I hate you mages spamming your arcane explosions and using your frost novas. But if you've wasted your blink, it's game over man for you. Cheap Shot + Cold Blood Backstab +Kidney Shot +lalalalala it doesn't matter because you have 12 HP left. Stupid clothies! Warlocks are my favourite to kill though, because they have that damned fear. I always save some energy to kick them when they try casting it! And they can't blink out of my cheap shot, so I can usually stun lock them to death.

I was under the impression that SWAT teams typically are composed of people with actual military training. Anecdotal, but the one I know is. EDIT: A quick check on the internets makes it seem like this is not the case. Yay me for being somewhat motivated.

Says the chap that supports the death penalty.

That I need to play it. Unfortunately WoW has dragged me back in...