near-term release schedule

I’ve decided to beef up the internal AI somewhat by porting over some of the role passing work that my group and I did on the Cerebus robot.  That will let the characters do certain kinds of reactive planning and epistemic reasoning very very fast and essentially continually replan at frame rate.  Depending on the number of cycles I can get to do hacking, that ought to take a few days.  So I’m assuming it will take me three weeks.  So here’s the current release schedule:

• Version -0.1
  Out now, depends on XNA 2.0
• Version 0.0
  Out by November 15.  Port to XNA 3.0
• Version 0.1
  Out by Thanksgiving.  Will include reactive planning for appetitive behaviors (basically, you’ll be able to say pick up X without first telling the character to walk over to X).  I’ll also put in some tweening that I haven’t bothered with in the past (right now, if you tell a character to grab an object, the hand and object snap together rather than the hand smoothly moving to the object).

After that, I’ll probably move to working on some simple social behaviors, but I don’t have a release schedule for those.

Source release

The good news is that I’ve made a source release that ought to be easy for other people to install.  The bad news is that it turns out that Microsoft deprecated the version of XNA that I’m using a week ago and you can’t download it anymore.  So I’m designating this version -0.1.  When I get back to Chicago, I’ll install VS 2008 and XNA 3.0, do the port (which in theory will be easy) and will release that as version 0.0.  Since I hope to have that version in a couple of days, I’m not going to bother putting the 2.0 version up on the web, but if you just drop me a note, I’m happy to send it to you.

advice about distributing the code

I’ve been saying that I was going to distribute Twig open-source, which is true.  Any yet, there are no pointers to the code.  Why is that?  It’s because I haven’t had a chance to figure out some of the mechanics of distributing the code.  In particular, I haven’t figured out:

• Which of the many open-source licenses to use (my inclination is to make it available for commercial use, since anyone trying to use it in a commercial product would likely want to reimplement it in C++ anyway).
• Where to put the code.  The obvious possibilities are something like source forge, my own SVN server, or just a zip file on a web site that I periodically update.
• Should I use a bugzilla, wiki, etc.

It looks at the moment like that default plan will be to use LGLP and my own SVN server.  But advice on any of these issues is welcome.  In the mean time, I am distributing the code informally; just drop me an email.

My AI blog

I should mention that I have another blog that isn’t restricted to talking about Twig.  It hasn’t been as active because I’ve been working on Twig, but you can find it at http://ianhorswill.wordpress.com.

episode 3

I did this as a demo for the AIIDE talk.  As a consequence, it has some in jokes in it.  So be advised that AIIDE means “(Conference on) Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment”, chaired this year by Michael Mateas of Facade fame, and AAAI means “Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence”, the professional organization that sponsors it.  The ZIP file is available for download, but remember to install the XNA 2.0 redistributable if you haven’t already.

AIIDE talk slides

Are here.  AIIDE talks are only 15 minutes, so it’s super-compressed.  But it does document some of the newer stuff like object manipulation.

AIIDE paper on twig

Sorry.  I should have posted this a while ago.  This is a paper on Twig, the procedural animation system about which this blog is about.  It’s for the AIIDE conference in Stanford in a little over a week or so.  It’s short and incomplete but I’ll be writing a longer journal version and I’ll be posting information on the system here.

I also have a more general research blog that isn’t focused on Twig, but more on AI broadly construed.

now with zip files

It turns out that the .ccgame files created by XNA creators club are only recognized if you install XNA game studio, not if you only install the XNA redistributable.  So I’m distributing the applications as normal ZIP files now.

New episodes: the mortgage bailout

I’ve added two new episodes, The Mortgage Bailout Explained, parts 1 and 2.  These are really too talky for this medium, but I wanted to experiment with how to try to time dialog.  See webcomic page above to download them.

 

New features: gestures, fighting, faster dialog, pausing/speeding dialog, and a somewhat lame implementation of passing objects from one character to another.

webcomic: episode 0

I’m going to try out new features in Twig by using it to make a “webcomic”, in the sense of short episodes published frequently (I hope).  The first episode uses dialog, props, walking, and some physics.   See the webcomic page for episodes and instructions.