One problem with machines reading natural language is that they don’t cope very well with metaphor. Case in point: I get a steady stream of search engine traffic from people looking for information about ant nests. Seeing these visitors on my referrers list causes me a degree of guilt at clicks wasted and searches frustrated. But as fortune would have it, one of my favourite sites recently put up a couple of articles about ants and ant nests, allowing me to redirect these folk there and assuage my conscience.
Do check out Tracking Ants and Nest-casting on BLDGBLOG - they’re both great reads. If you’re here for both ants and games/simulations, I recommend to you the fabulous but flawed SimAnt, which I’ll maybe write about in more detail one day.
Monthly Archive for May, 2006
This Dark Messiah video is one of my favourite things to come out of E3 2006. As well as some stunningly beautiful environments, it reminds me a lot of some comments Gabe Newell made last year about Valve’s goals for Half-Life 2: Episode One: “You don’t want to have a sense that there’s a box around the NPC and you see these boxes bumping into each other. You want to have a sense that they’re in the world interacting with things closely, like they can reach out to stuff, they can push things to the ground, they can kick things. … Have it not be that sort of fakey box-box interactions.” The great thing about this video is that it looks like Arkane is applying that approach to the player as well as the NPCs.