Comic Book Code



  • This discussion on the GameDev AI forums is so wtf that I wasn't quite sure what either participant was talking about - except that they seemed to be designing an AI based on events in an obscure comic book. It's a long discussion, but it's worth the read as it just gets crazier and crazier.

    An excerpt:

    "The design now will be based on a neural network, with threading. Only instead of a number being told to represent a neural path, an emotion will represent it."

     The link: http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=430670
     



     



  • I didn't bother to read very far, but it looks like this is an attempt to figure out a set of rules which would actually allow the world in Kid Radd to happen. Kid Radd was a daily online comic strip (with animated parts) which described the adventures of some characters from fictional (and often parody) video games who escaped and lived in a world inside computers and/or the Internet. Lots of bendy physics and pseudo-science.


    Since the interactions between characters were usually left with intentionally vague physics, any attempt to make a uniform basis is going to sound (and be!) really, really weird.

    There's an online archive of the strip at http://www.kidradd.com/ -- it's 601 strips, but you can download an archive and read them from your local HD.



  • @microsage said:

    An excerpt:

    "The design now will be based on a neural network, with threading. Only
    instead of a number being told to represent a neural path, an emotion
    will represent it."

    Using an emotion to represent a neural path? Doesn't that sound a bit backwards? I mean, computers don't enumerate emotions generally, and if you were to do so, it'd effectively be a number again anyway.

    Sounds to me like a project that will never get anywhere beyond talk. 



  • While the project itself looks wacky alright (some people do seem to have too much time on their hands), don't dismiss the online comic the original's idea is based on. I went to see it out of curiosity, and found myself unable to stop reading until the very end. It might have been an obscure online comic, but not because of a lack of quality. On the contrary, the writing is extremely solid, the humour never gets old, the sprite comic design fits perfectly the subject, and the characters are deep and likeable - all of them.

    This Kid Radd comic is actually one gem of an online comic, and it's worth a good look. And anyone able to make Matrix-like 360 views with sprites and GIF-animation deserves some praise :) .

    However, be careful when you read the comic online. The comic player used there (which seems to have been written by the author himself) seems to be a WTF in itself...



  • @SpoonMeiser said:

    Sounds to me like a project that will never get anywhere beyond talk. 

    This makes me feel very 7452978.
     



  • I read Kid Radd just out of curiosity - and I couldn't stop until I got to the end.  I would highly recommend this comic to any of you who like webcomics - Kid Radd half comedy and half drama, and entirely impossible to stop reading after you've started!



  • @Tsela said:

    However, be careful when you read the comic online. The comic player used there (which seems to have been written by the author himself) seems to be a WTF in itself...

     (I know I'm picking on the single tiny point of complain in your praise but I can't help so sorry :p)

     As far as I remember, the origins of the "weird-seeming" player are the observation, that many other sprite comics are transferring true-colored, screen-filling PNGs (or even JPEGs) that basically don't display much more than scaled up 8 color images a few pixels in size and lots of blank space. To avoid this, Kid Radd stores the "sprites" with their original size and color set and uses HTML to scale them up and arrange them. Images are also reused wherever they can be to allow efficient caching.

    I agree that the author had propably been better off with CSS absolute positioning or a Flash based design but I think the idea is highly honourable. And it works: when the comic was "in progress" it was noteably for its blazingly fast loading speeds even on slow connections.
     

    As for that topic, the community (like every self-respecting webcomic community) had sometimes a tendency to over-analyze things. (I guess I'm guillable of that as well :) Things became especially funny when people tried to map the comic happenings to the "real internet". The author's response to those things was usually "dude, it's a comic" though :)
     


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