> On 02/01/2008, Dave Griffiths <dave_at_pawfal.org> wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Some text from me about live coding and games, contains a brief history
>> of
>> livecoding (apologies for anyone I missed out) - and some stuff on
>> programming games (i.e. games where programming is part of the
>> gameplay)...
>
>
>
> Very interesting and a fun read. Thanks!
>
> Most of the examples of programming in games that have been mentioned on
> the
> list so far have related to relatively old and relatively obscure games
> that
> don't seem to have mass market appeal right now.
>
> So; I would like to point out that Final FantasyXII which is fairly recent
> and is very popular indeed has a system for programming friendly AI.
>
> In this game you control a group of young warriors that travel and get in
> a
> lot of battles. Unlike previous versions ("Final" is getting quite silly
> as
> a word here) combat is in realtime. The catch is that the player doesn't
> have to control all actions by all active friendly characters explicitly
> and
> can instead use a simple but relatively versatile set of rules to form a
> sort of AI for his characters.
>
> Aside from the evident mainstream appeal of this game another aspect that
> might be interesting here is the way this system is woven into the
> gameplay.
> In FinalFantasy the player can discover and acquire items like magical
> swords but in this version the player can similarly find or "buy" new
> instructions. These are fairly simple, no loops or recursion or exceptions
> or whatever, we are talking about stuff in the order of "target; a
> sleeping
> enemy" which will allow one to construct a rule that basically expresses
> "if
> you see a sleeping enemy try to steel loot from him", the character will
> do
> this unless some other rule is more important at that moment (this is
> expressed by the order in which they are placed) but the way in which all
> of
> this is integrated with the rest of the game is somewhat interesting.
>
> I wonder to what degree this mechanic will use the rather common situation
> of gamers cursing at friendly AI controlled characters to introduce
> programming as a concept to people who might otherwise never encounter it,
> this might be a strong incentive to some.
That's really interesting, I haven't played any of the FF series for quite
some time now. I wonder how far they will take this.
According to wikipedia:
"Itō drew inspiration for gambits from plays in American football
where each team member has a specific job to do based on the conditions
and desired outcome."
Sounds like it's worthy of further investigation for non-computer live
coding :)
The only similar thing I've seen like this are the controls for "The Sims"
where you stack up instructions in order, but they are not conditional.
cheers,
dave
Received on Wed Jan 02 2008 - 16:40:54 GMT