http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2011/11/skyrim-infinite-quests/
Seems like the talented (especially when it comes to programming) folks at Bethesda have finally proved infinity exists. And it's in their video game. Now perhaps the ``in Lisp'' guy will study some math.
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Anonymous2011-11-09 14:41
>infinite quests
ALL SHIT, FUCK YOU
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Anonymous2011-11-09 15:04
>>1
randomly generating quests has been around for years now. Enjoy your randomly generated "Kill X Monster Y times" and "Deliver X message to Y person" and "Bring me X of Y items "
shame, they could have used that effort to make a good game.
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Anonymous2011-11-09 16:53
>>8
This is Bethesda we're talking about. Have you seen the animations in their previous games? Crash Bandicoot had better animations and that was in 1996 on the Playstation. Maybe it's because Naughty Dog used Lisp.
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Anonymous2011-11-09 16:56
Have any of you miminum wage idiots ever hear of something called countably infinite sets?
>>9 Since the soul of good Animation, is…. drum roll please… animation! We were obsessed with making ours look like that really good Disney or Looney Tunes stuff. In those days, most people used a simple skeleton system with “1 joint” weighting, and very few bones. This gives a very stiff look, so we went instead with vertex animation. This allowed us to use the more sophisticated 3-4 joint weighting available in PowerAnimator, which the Playstation had no hope of matching at runtime (until the PS2), instead we stored the location of every vertex, every frame at 30 frames a second. No one else had the guts, as while this was easy to render, it required inventing some totally hardcore assembly language vertex compressors. First me (three times), then Dave (twice), then finally Mark took a crack at it.
Mark’s was the best — being the best assembly programmer of us three — but also the most complicated.
>>13 This allowed us to use the more sophisticated 3-4 joint weighting available in PowerAnimator, which the Playstation had no hope of matching at runtime
Really? I didn't know matrix multiplications and linear interpolations were that incredibly expensive.
I'm pretty sure the number of quests the game can generate is provably finite, unless its runtime memory usage is unbounded, which would cause it not to work in the first place.
I don't think Todd Howard understands infinity. Then again, I guess not a lot of people do.
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Anonymous2011-11-09 18:16
>>9
Crash Bandicoot is my favourite video game.
NaughtyDog made their own lisp compiler for this game.
They also used AI algorithms to place certain data on the CD, so it was possible to read level data on the fly.
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Anonymous2011-11-09 18:23
>>17
They can just release the resources used by quests that are done.
>>18
I really don't see what AI algorithms have to do with seek-free loading optimization, assuming you mean that. Because "read level data on the fly" makes even less sense in this context.
>>20
From what I understood, they designed AI algorithm, that placed chunks of level data on the disc in such way, that it was loaded fast enough. What you had on screen at one moment was loaded from such level chunk. Then, when you moved character forward/backward, another chunk was loaded. Unfortunatelly I don't know the details.
>>17
I'm pretty sure >>1 was just joking/trolling, there's no need to take it so seriously.
There are indeed reasons why ultrafinitism is likely to be unsound and reasons to be at least a classical finitist (or maybe higher in some cases, but that depends on one's philosophy of mathematics views and which theories they accept as likely consistent), however they obviously won't be found in the fact that some game can generate a very large (but finite) amount of possible variations of itself.
>>24
It could be seeded/resetted multiple times during the play and maybe various things the player does could also cause that. Whatever quantum randomness in the player's environment could end up causing various macroscopic effects and changing the player's behavior. Not that this matters, the number of possibilities are still likely finite, as long as ... or maybe not, if we assume the player has no lifespan limit, the actual output may very well be unique as long as the game itself never halts. Even a program that outputs pi's digits without halting would have an infinite trace. Not that I think our local resident ultrafinitist believes in the variety of multiverses which would allow such potentially infinite traces of a program, so this is all irrelevant trolling.
>>26
That was referring to Even a program that outputs pi's digits without halting would have an infinite trace. Of course you can have infinite non-repeating output if you allow external input not bound by limited memory or time.
>>27
But if set theory is true we could work with the smaller infinites until RAM gets cheaper.
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Anonymous2011-11-09 22:35
>>1
I've seen that in UFO Defence already in 1994. BTW, the game featured interactive destructible world, unlike today's static crap scenes modelled in 3ds max.
Infinity is just a shitty concept to fix broken math.
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Anonymous2011-11-09 22:54
Why do aspies have to take shit so literally? I mean, the boys in marketing will use buzzwords that sell product. "Infinite" "Everlasting" "Forever" "Dick licking good" are all words that are used to make influence consumers, so they can turn a profit. In this case a fucking video game. Check yourselves, before you wreck yourselves.
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Anonymous2011-11-10 0:46
>>32
Mathematics is just crappy game with ridiculous marketing. I'll be using Lisp instead.
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Anonymous2011-11-10 1:52
Dick licking good
I'd buy play a game advertised like that.