Mapping changing your views on life and video games?

Mapping has never really made gaming any less fun/scary/whatever for me. About the only thing it has changed is that it's made me notice errors more, but even those I don't care about (too much) since I've probably made 'em too.

Lol always makes me laugh when people (mainly magazines) talk
about characters in game with "AI"... Fewls, SS is the word :razz:

SS? Scripted Sequences? I doubt that's what the magazines are talking
about. Most NPCs in most games do have basic AI. It's not a scripted
sequence when a bunch of grunts deliberately stalk and surround you,
that's the game's AI handler in action.

(Unless you want self-aware NPCs. Those guys will try to prevent you
from shutting down the PC and attempt to take over the world after
killing all the humans :razz: )

now perhaps i was the only one who noticed, perhaps not but, if you played unreal with bots alone the damned things seemed to learn your style and eventually give you a decent run for your money while fragging. for instance, if you camped and killed them off, eventually they would begin looking in that spot for you to hide in it and kill you as you approached it. i saw many instances where the AI of unreal learned your habits, or seemed to. :/

I think that "AI" is a mid complex string of equations set by how much you crouch, jump, shoot, and your quadrant in the map in the X,Y,Z coordinate. Often games can be very devious in how they make you think it is AI.

For instance, as Fraggard said with grunts surrounding you- it is merely a bot that is told to do a circle manouvre, triggered by a long series of "Scripted sequence" like happenings. If you perform a certain action in a certain situation, just like SS, then the grunt bots will be told to perfom the SS and circle around you. It really isn't that amazing when you think about it.

I can imangine reviewers praising the way that grunt opens a hatch and
tosses a satchel in the pipe you're crawling through ("Surface
Tension", Half-life).

I think that "AI" is a mid complex string of equations set by
how much you crouch, jump, shoot, and your quadrant in the map in the
X,Y,Z coordinate. Often games can be very devious in how they make you
think it is AI.
For instance, as Fraggard said with grunts surrounding you- it is
merely a bot that is told to do a circle manouvre, triggered by a long
series of "Scripted sequence" like happenings. If you perform a certain
action in a certain situation, just like SS, then the grunt bots will
be told to perfom the SS and circle around you. It really isn't that
amazing when you think about it.

Actually, if you think about it some more, it becomes a bit tougher.
Let's say a grunt has two choices, he can go to higher ground and get a
clear line-of-sight shot at you, but his distance from you increases.
Or he can stay where he is and have a 75% chance of hitting you, but if
he does hit you, you die. Instantly. Which should the NPC choose? It's
those choices between "scripted sequences" that makes AI seem real.

My AI coding knowledge is zero, but current FPSs use all sorts of
techniques: Finite State machines, Genetic Algorithms, Neural networks,
Fuzzy Logic, Evolutionary Programming, and whatnot. I don't even
understand what they mean but I am not going to write them off as
"simple" :smile:

(I've seen a ten-year-old mapper before).

I'm 15 :/ but im only a noob mapper :biggrin:

Even though mappers are not generally more mature, we as a group definitely have higher intelligence than the average gamers. It's not easy to map, and it requires even more planning and creativity to come up with a fun single player map.

In fact, I believe mapping could be incorporated into school curriculum, especially for mathematics and geometry. But the skills for mapping and game design could easily be taught as part of physics, art, music, and computer science (for the coding part).

Wouldn't it be nice to have a school that teaches all the courses through mapping? I would love to do my homework that way. And the final project is to make a big mod with the entire class, with each person applying his or hers expertise into the mod. You get graded on gameplay and artistic design.

Its called a degree in architecture... its what I do. But we are more realistic, often alot of the maps for HL2 and games are more theoretical and are unlikely to be habitable.

im 16, andfor some reason using onscreen kb..... gets back to chem revision

$loth dude, please please for all those 1700 odd posts in about 4 months, make a LITTLE effort with punctuation and grammar - simple things like capitalising the beginning of sentences :wink:

You of all people should know better!

Today i looked down when i was sitting, and i imagined how i would look
like in polygons and i saw my own leg in cell shaded low poygon. That
was scary!

make a LITTLE effort with punctuation and grammar

I am glad I'm not the only one who's disturbed by bad grammar and spelling. There is hope in the world after all. The English language will not deteriorate into a string of l33t speak. Because there are some ideas and feelings which cannot be adequately expressed with "w00t" or "pwned".

I had a flash of inspiration in english from something, my water bottle
probably, some big hole thats displacement with some overlooking
platform...

...generic stuff really, but it looked kickass in my mind.