Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Artificial Intelligence for Video Games - Assignment 1

This semester I am taking a course titled "Artificial Intelligence for Video Games" for my masters degree here at UNM. Our first assignment is to implement seek, flee and arrive in a programming language called "Processing" (basically Java). For this assignment, I started off with simple geometric shapes, but after finishing a few days early I decided to try and make something a little more funny.

What would be an interesting scene involving one object chasing another? One of the first things that came to my mind would be Michael Jackson chasing a child. Hopefully everyone finds this humorous and not in (too) bad taste.

Click this image to view the video in Flash



Click here for the movie in .AVI.
For you Mac fans, I've got it here in .MOV.

If anyone has experience with Processing/Java, I was having some trouble getting the sounds to work. I thought it would be funny to have a sound when Michael "catches" the boy, and possibly when the program starts. I also have a few ideas for future expansion of this concept, but I want to keep things a surprise until I see future assignments. One thing I REALLY want to do is to implement this stuff in ActionScript instead of Processing. I'm not sure if my professors will be OK with that and for this assignment I didn't have the time to write two versions.

This is a video of my "arrive" code - thanks youtube for the hosting


Shout outs go to my sister Autumn for doing the photoshop on Michael and the boy, Jeremy Pepper for general support and Oleg Semenov for help talking about the geometry I was messing up.

I'll post the code after I turn in the assignment tomorrow. If you want it, and I forget to upload it, please leave me a comment.

Sunday, September 7, 2008

Oleg in Church

After seeing the true life documentary "Borat - Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" and the truly inspirational scene in which Borat learns about Protestant Christianity, I decided to bring my favorite Kazakh friend to church with me.


I'm really happy with the way the stained glass illuminated Oleg, especially from my cell phone camera.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Programming Languages - Lecture Three

During this lecture, we continued our discussion of the Haskell language. Some of the things we covered were types, curried functions and overloaded functions.

Click the above image for an embedded Flash version of the movie.

Or, if you prefer, download the movies in Quicktime or .AVI.