Andrew at Grand Text Auto gives some insightful thoughts on the whys and hows of building an interactive story industry. I am a little bothered that he says we need procedural facial and body gestures in characters with the implication that it is not currently available as we have known each other and he has known about my technology for years. I wont dwell on it, sure it was just an oversight or my misreading. Plugs are always welcome you know 
Archive for May, 2005
Interactive story views
May 25th, 2005Absence makes the heart…
May 23rd, 2005Well, whatever, sorry for the absence of posts, I have been up to my neck in work recently. I just hope that it turns into money some where along the line.
Funny piece in The Guardian today, a “Futurologist” claims computers will have “Emotions” in 50 years! The very idea, ridiculous I guess I must be living in a time warp then 
To be fair most of the points he makes are stating the somewhat obvious to anyone vaguely familiar with AI or science/computing in general. It puzzles me when people are astounded to hear these things as it is simply extrapolating the future. Do people think at some mysterious point in the near future science is going to stop discovering, computer power will stop increasing, inventors will stop inventing? This is what you would have to believe if you thought these future predictions were too wild to be accurate, unless you have a crystal ball and know something we dont?
Bye the way, if any of you ever want to see a simulation of emotion and personality just ask, my demo is ready to show. If you are in the neighborhood that is.
Content creation frameworks IV
May 2nd, 2005Continuing the series that I intended to last all week but has come a little faster …
The Tools
While I have talked before about the various technologies required to create interactive drama and in particular emotional characters in a business sense I see three over arching themes that will be required, Open Source, Open Standards and Interoperability.
Open Source technologies are maturing to the stage where a “stack” is emerging for various content creation and “game” development tasks. For the content required with interactive drama these tools should be sufficient. The latest and greatest 3D engines and characters are not required for our audience. This is very important as our first content creators will have very limited budgets and our target audience will not be paying $49.99 for their content, more like $4.99. Of course this could just as well mean “cheap” tools rather than “free” but Open Source offers the advantage of being able to customize these tools and in the initial stages this is going to be necessary to build an Interactive Drama “Platform” in which content creators can create with ease. » Read more: Content creation frameworks IV
Content creation frameworks III
May 1st, 2005To continue our series on content creation frameworks …
The Producers
If game developers will not, cannot or do not create interactive drama then who will? This is another catch 22. There are currently possibly only a handful of people who have the knowhow to even begin to try and create this type of content. Much needs to be learned. The question then is where is the best place to start? I would look again at the movie / TV industry and rather than try and extend game designers interactive abilities to include story, plot and character development it would be better to extend, for example, a script writers story, plot and character development abilities into the new interactive realm. » Read more: Content creation frameworks III
Content creation frameworks II
May 1st, 2005Continuing our series on content creation frameworks …
The Product
So we have our 18 – 30 year old female sitting at her (low to mid spec unaccelerated) PC, what content would she be interested in? Ideally it would not be action based as this would sail us too close to the “game” tag and the game business already has that pretty well covered. Better to offer content that until know they have not been able to get elsewhere but have longed to play. Also as our poor content creator is unlikely to have a huge budget we should not have too expansive a scope. » Read more: Content creation frameworks II
Content creation frameworks I
May 1st, 2005I have had some interesting conversations in the past on Grand Text Auto and recently too about what it would take to create the tools required and the market for interactive drama for example. My interest here is not so much the tools themselves as the fact that emotional characters will be a major element of those tools. This, of course, makes me very interested in the bigger questions too, especially with my background with behavior and dialog content creation toolkits. » Read more: Content creation frameworks I
Where are they now II?
May 1st, 2005
I was reminded that I should have included Motivate by Motion Factory in my post yesterday, especially as they seem to be the only ones to really have made any headway, limited though it was to Prince of Persia 3D. » Read more: Where are they now II?
