Vortex

LOL Cipher one of the best classes in the game? Not sure if serious. Its pretty worrying that they needed to be adjusted in the day 1 patch....

The new character highlighting looks like total crap, like i mean it’s just atrocious....If that gets implemented give people the option to turn it off....Not sure I understand what’s so bad with just having the selection circles below the selected characters...

PayPal is up!!! http://satellitereign.com/pledge/

And they hit their funding goal!!! YAY

I'm sure they will hit 440k Hopefulyl they manage to have paypal open before the last 48 hours and reminders....Btw stretch gals annunced:

AI for emergent gameplay Update #17 · Jul 13, 2013 · 40 comments MikeD here. I thought I'd write a piece about AI and how I'm coding it up with relevance to emergent game-play. You may not want to read on if you prefer to think its all done by magic, but if you want to take a glimpse behind the curtain read on. I like my ai's to react meaningfully to stimulus, which basically means giving them the ability to see and hear. That may sound obvious, but a lot of ai's in games don't react to anything, they are simply pre-placed in the world, told to go to sleep and are woken up when the player enters a specific trigger box, perhaps halfway down a corridor they are in. So they wake up and start executing their pre given command shoot player. You can get away with this in linear games and sometimes its actually the best way if you want to have total control of your game, everything tightly scripted, almost like the ai's are following a movie script. Zombie dog jump through window 3 seconds after player steps into this invisible box. It can make games atmospheric, but the downside is its totally the same every time you play through, you die and restart the level, same guy triggers, same dog jumps through window, Yawn! I much prefer games that take a behavior driven approach, you basically code up multiple behaviors make them react to stimulus and give them a bit of decision making capability. So lets take a standard behavior, Guard. You can imagine this as a typical security guard, night after night given the duty to guard an area. Lets give him an area he is going to guard some kind of compound, nobody should be entering this secure area. The guard has 2 main senses we need to worry about sight and sound, sight has a field of view (FOV), say 150 degrees and a range, the range might be a km, but he also might not care about what anyone is doing 100 meters outside the volume he is guarding. Hearing has no FOV but has a range much shorter than sight lets say 100 meters.Sound travels slow so would take about 1/3rd of a second to travel 100 meters. Then we factor in reaction times too. Events, events are the means by which we communicate things happening that ai's need to know about. Fire a gun, broadcast that event to everyone within 500 meters say, here's the key though, the sound of the event goes into a queue for everyone within range. They will receive the event when the sound has correctly reached them, the visual of the event will reach them instantly, but if its outside their FOV or something is blocking their line of sight (LOS) they won't react to the visual cue. So really 2 events are created and are propagated at different rates, Gunshot audio event and visual event. Audio Events also are less precise they may only provide the listener with a possible volume for the source of the sound and the volume will be bigger the further away the sound is, and again if there's no LOS maybe the sound had to bounce off a few surfaces to reach the listener so its even less accurate where the source is. How people react to events is decided by their current behavior as well as various stats they may have.So back to our guard, a gun shot outside his guarded area is probably going to raise his attention if its close enough, what's some of his basic responses we may have actions for. Go investigate Take Cover Sound an Alarm Run Away and hide Simply turn and look in that direction and wait Ignore it With a bit of fuzzy logic we can decide which of these options the guard is going to take, we might factor in his boredom levels/ tiredness/ bravery perhaps its a violent area where gun shots are frequently heard outside his compound. To decide which action we take, we look at a set of essential properties that the AI is looking to maximize such as Financial, Safety, Food, Sex, Excitement, Sleep, Respect. These properties generally decay over time, people get hungrier,sleepier,hornier..Doing something heroic might increase your respect levels and excitement levels.Running away might decrease respect a little but increase your safety but decrease finance (you are not paid to run away). Now each of the 6 actions above can have a +/- value assigned to each of the 7 essential properties for each of the type of events that might happen. Investigating a gunshot might increase heroic and excitement and decrease safety a little. The amount these essential properties changes can be scaled based on distance of the event, and also base stats such as how brave the ai is, or intelligence, or monetary greed etc. So now this Guard can compare the scores for all his choices choose the highest scoring option, compare it perhaps against his current activity and decide what to do. For extra dynamics the essential properties feed into each other, too much excitement can be detrimental to safety, sleep and hunger. Too much food can make him sleepy. We can factor sleepiness into reactions Everything feeds into everything else causing a chaotic system, but also a believable system, a systems where the Guard will go get some food because his hunger level got too high, or he fell asleep on the job because he got to sleepy, or he decided to run away from a shoot out because he’s basically a bit of a coward and the financial gains of defending the compound didn't out-way the risk of being killed. These stats can also factor into taking a bribe, or being distracted by an attractive member of the opposite sex, or what the guard is going to do when his work shift finishes. Of course the event might not be a gunshot, it might be a car crashing through a gate, or having a gun aimed at you, or being offered a bribe, or an explosion, or a bullet ricochet, or a near miss from a laser beam, or a muffled grunt or a soft foot fall behind you, the lights cutting out, a siren blaring, discovering a dead body... The bottom line is by giving AI’s behaviors, and a behavior being set up with lots of possible reactions to lots of different events, and factoring in base genetics of each AI with their current state and needs, we can make the world react to the player in a believable way, and can remove the scripted feel to the game as the AI reacts different depending on how you break into the compound to steal the computer equipment, by stealth, by explosives, by sheer gun power, perhaps you just offer the guard enough money, perhaps one of your female agents seduces him.

New update for the Syndicate successor Satellite Reign is up. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/5livesstudios/satellite-reign/posts/534343 Talking about classes and agent death etc.

Agent Death Agents can and will die! If your agents body dies their consciousness is removed and implanted into a new body. Agents will keep their skills and abilities which are carried across with their consciousness. New agents are cloned from a selection of bodies back at base. New bodies can be obtained by multiple means, like: purchasing them from the black market or harvesting them from the population. Cloned bodies have genetic traits that give small bonuses to your agents. Agents lost in the field will lose their augmentations and equipment but if you are fast enough you can salvage the corpse for spare parts or we have multiple insurance packages available to suit your needs. Classes Your squad is comprised of 4 different agents, each with their own class or speciality: Soldier, Support, Assassin or Hacker. This is only the agents starting point. You are free to customise each of your agents to be fully combat oriented, fully espionage oriented, or anything in-between. Agents will be able to be customised by giving them different augmentations, skills / abilities, weapons and gear. Each of these customisation options will allow them to play more of a combat role or an espionage role, or anything in-between.

We're doing a reddit AMA at 21:00 GMT, 16:00 EST (in approx 8.5 hours) I've posted about the reddit iama to a few subreddits , you may like to go upvote them for visibility. http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1i03om/we_are_5_lives_studios_the_team_kickstarting/ http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1i03re/we_are_5_lives_studios_the_team_kickstarting/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/1i03sw/we_are_5_lives_studios_the_team_kickstarting/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1i04px/we_are_5_lives_studios_the_team_kickstarting/

Boxed copy tier added

Agreed, I'm sure these guys still have a coupletricks up their sleeve as well. Can also vote for them on GOG and Steam now: On GoG: http://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/satellite_reign_5_lives_studios And Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/…

Should pick up now that its Monday.

Yeah thats the huge issue. This is also my first game in pouns. If it were anythign but Syndicate or if the pitch wouldnt of been so damn good I wouldnt of entered my CC number either. I'm hoping it doesnt hurt them too much. The Pitch one of the best I have seen on kickstarter and it will be an insult if Double Fines Massive Chalice ends up with more money considering their pitch was an insult.

Being unable to edit my original post is unfortunate....people backing Syndicates spiritual successor that I appreciate!!! One of my all time favorite Childhood games deserves a real successor.

<iframe width="640" height="480" src="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/5livesstudios/satellite-reign/widget/video.html" frameborder="0"> </iframe> Satellite Reign is a real-time, class-based strategy game. You control a team of four agents, each with distinct and unique abilities, collectively battling for control of a fully simulated, living cyberpunk city. The game world is designed to facilitate emergent gameplay, giving you the tools and freedom to play how you want to play, so you can create strategies and scenarios that not even we had anticipated! Customize your team with the strength to destroy your enemies head-on, or hack into their facilities to manipulate their infrastructure without them ever knowing you were even there. Will you take down your enemies with brute-force? Covert espionage and infiltration? Or will you use propaganda to influence the citizens of the city and overthrow the controlling powers? The city is huge and you can move around and tackle objectives however you want to. You won't be spoon-fed one mission after another, you'll be able to use whatever means you can to get to your final goal. Bribe scientists to advance your technologies, and kidnap doctors to augment your agents. Steal money from the banks to fund your war against the corporations, and exploit neural implants to bend the will of others. Or, try to take your objectives through good old-fashioned brute-force. <iframe frameborder="0" height="380" src="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/5livesstudios/satellite-reign/widget/card.html" width="220"></iframe>