I have been working on debris lately. I think it looks pretty cool to have this debris floating around after destroying stuff.
Debris Video
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Latest Gunship Demo Video
This is the latest video for the game I’m creating
The game involves going on missions, getting upgrades, customizing your spaceship with different guns, missiles, armor, shields, engines, etc.
Let me know if you have any suggestions or feedback.
Signup for email updates here: www.AtomicboySoftware.com/Gunship
Current State of the AI
I’ve mentioned previously that I’m working on the AI for Empires of Steel, and spinning it off into it’s own project. I’m still busy on things. My two main goals right now are:
* Make the AI less integrated with the game itself – i.e. Turning the AI into a separate project (which runs in a dll), removing Empires of Steel-specific code, and making the AI’s communication with the game more straight-forward.
* Creating a user-interface which shows me exactly what the artificial intelligence doing/thinking, which is important for debugging the code. This will help a lot when making improvements to the AI.
Making these changes to the AI has created a few bugs in the code. I’ve been busy fixing those bugs. I’d like to put out an update to the game soon, which includes the new AI, but only if the new AI is better than the old one.
DeepMind Artificial Intelligence [Video]
I stumbled on this interesting video the other day. DeepMind is a company founded to create general artificial intelligence (“general” meaning that the AI can understand all kinds of different things, like a human being can). Most AI is “narrow” – which means it it specifically created to solve one problem (like play chess very well).
The whole video is interesting, but you can jump ahead to 10:00 to see the AI learn to play 1980s video games. It does a surprisingly good job at playing Space Invaders and Breakout. It doesn’t do so well with more complicated games like PacMan, though. The amazing thing is that the only information they feed the AI is the screen image. The AI slowly learns to play the game by trying to maximize his score.
The Artificial Intelligence Project
I’ve been working on creating an AI that can play strategy games, lately. I’m taking the Artificial Intelligence that was used in Empires of Steel and making it more generic, so that it can play other strategy games, as well as making it smarter and faster. Here’s a screenshot of the interface so far.
Casualties of World War II [Video]
This was a pretty interesting video about the number of deaths in World War 2, by country.
Endless Space [Game Review]
Note: I did a review of Endless Space 3 years ago, when it was still in alpha.
Endless Space is another space 4x game. It seems like there’s a bunch of space 4x games that have come out in the past few years. I wouldn’t really rate any of them as great, though. Overall, I feel that Endless Space does a decent job. So let’s jump into it:
User Interface
The User Interface is done well, at least in terms of looking pretty, and having good zoom-in/zoom-out functionality. Here’s a few screenshots to illustrate what I mean:
The star map (click to enlarge):
The star system view, where you set your build orders (click to enlarge):
“How Facebook is Stealing Billions of Views”
I agree with all of this. The quick version, for people who don’t want to take time to watch the video is this:
Creators put videos on YouTube, and they get ad-revenue based on views.
Other people/companies/etc take popular videos from YouTube and post them (in Facebook video format) onto their own Facebook page.
Creators don’t like this, because it deprives them of ad-revenue, popularity, and allows other people (on Facebook) to get the benefits of their videos (growing their own brand, increased popularity of their Facebook page, allowing them to sell other products, etc).
Here’s the Frank Green article mentioned at the end of the video: https://medium.com/@hankgreen/theft-lies-and-facebook-video-656b0ffed369
Empires of Steel, Let’s Play Video
The YouTuber, Sabouts, has put up a Let’s Play video for Empires of Steel. Check it out:
Empires of Steel is ‘Pay What You Want’
Yes, that’s right: Empires of Steel is now available at the low, low cost of pay-what-you-want. Enjoy.
Head to www.EmpiresOfSteel.com and look for the “Buy Now” link.