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educationtech · 11 months

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A Look at the Future of AI Technology - Arya College

Artificial Intelligence or AI at top engineering colleges in Jaipur is a wide branch of Computer Science that deals with developing smart systems having the ability to perform business tasks. It aims to simulate human intelligence into these machines so that they are able to mimic the actions of a human under the given circumstances. This interdisciplinary science comes with numerous advancements and approaches that are possible with the help of Deep Learning, Machine Learning algorithms, Neural Networking, Natural Language Processing (NLP), etc.

Future Scope Of Artificial Intelligence In India

The adoption of Artificial Intelligence in India is promising. However, currently, it is at a nascent stage. While there are a few industries such as IT, manufacturing, automobile, etc, that is leveraging the prowess of AI; there are still many areas in which its potential is unexplored.

The immense potential that AI holds can be understood by the various other technologies that are covered under the umbrella of AI. Some of the examples of such technologies include self-improving algorithms, Machine Learning, Pattern Recognition, Big Data, and many others. In the next few years, it is predicted that there will hardly be any industry left untouched by this powerful tool. This is the reason why AI has so much potential to grow in India.

Some fields where AI is used or has an immense potential to grow are as follows:

Banking

Banking is not new to the trends of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies. The sector has rapidly adopted technology to stay up to date with the current market trends. It uses this technology to keep a record of customer data, which was earlier a monotonous manual task. With the rapid increase for data that is being generated and stored in the banking sector, today, Artificial Intelligence and ML allow professionals to do the same accurately and efficiently.

Some of the ways in which AI has made a significant difference in the field of banking include better customer support, enhanced data quality, prevention of fraud, digital assistants, and more. One of the most progressive fields in the world today is healthcare.

Healthcare and Medicine

According to one of the studies done by the experts of best engineering colleges in Jaipur, the scope of AI can add value to life as it is already been seen in the past couple of years. In addition, Data Science in Healthcare helps in various fields. The healthcare domain uses this technology to its advantage in several ways and continues to do so innovatively.

A use case of AI in this sector is the Collaborative Cancer Cloud developed by Intel and the Knight Career Institute. The cloud collects the past data of cancer patients and other patients with a similar disease so that they can help doctors diagnose cancer at an early stage based on the symptoms they show and compare them to the past available data. The best treatment for this fatal disease is to prevent it from reaching higher stages. It shows that the Artificial Intelligence will play a significant role in the medical field in the future rather than being used just for the purpose of augmentation.

AI is also used in other similar areas in the field of healthcare and medicine, such as drug testing, synthetic biology, etc. You can also be sure that AI will accelerate the process of scientific research and development that can aid this sector well.

Cyber Security

Cyber Security has gained massive popularity over recent years, and Artificial Intelligence has become extremely beneficial for this IT sector. Today, most organizations have either already transferred their data to the cloud or are on the verge of doing so. To keep their data safe from potential hackers and any sort of unauthorized access so that confidential business information is not leaked, which can create utter chaos and havoc in any company, companies need to detect and prevent such attacks.

Curbing hackers has been a big problem ever since cybercrimes started coming into the picture, and it has only escalated in the last few years. Fraud in credit cards is among the most prevalent cybercrimes. With recurrent neural networks and other similar AI methods, companies can detect this in the early stages.

Cognitive AI allows companies and the experts of BTech colleges Jaipur to detect external cyber threats and offer insightful analysis so that they can make informed business decisions. With the help of Deep Learning networks and Machine Learning algorithms, AI is becoming more capable of preventing advanced-level cyber threats and protecting companies from malicious attacks.

Business

AI is constantly changing the face of business, and it has been growing constantly. Unlike before, most businesses today have shifted online to meet the demands of the customers and provide them with a friendly experience in the comfort of their homes. Businesses are required to take care of the huge chunks of data generated every second so that they can derive significant details that can help them make better and informed decisions. This process can be difficult for the students of private engineering colleges in Jaipur without the help of Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, and other such advanced technologies.

Among all, AI plays the most crucial role in terms of business transformation. Many organizations try to extract insights and customer data online to understand and predict customer behavior and find which of their products is best suited for particular customers. They use this information and send personalized recommendations and messages, which can grab the attention of the customers.

Education

The scope of Artificial Intelligence in the future is huge in various sectors, one of them being education. With this technology in place, India can become the global leader in Artificial Intelligence. Today, education has become extremely important, and with the large youth population that India has, it is necessary that they get a quality education. Since AI is being implemented in several sectors, it is important for the education field as well to upgrade its strategies, keeping in mind the latest advancements in AI that can have an impact on this domain and the youth of today.

With the country making progress in almost every sector, it is obvious that it aims to excel in the most significant one, education. Artificial Intelligence at top artificial Intelligence College in Jaipur makes this process easy and innovative.

Career Scope In AIDS

Artificial Intelligence is predicted to create tons of job opportunities for entry-level and experienced professionals across various sectors in a few years. There are millions of opportunities available for AI-certified professionals. Some of the career options available for these individuals including AI Engineer, Artificial Intelligence Programmer, Machine Learning Engineer, Data Scientist, NLP Engineer, Data Analyst, AI Architect, Deep Learning Engineer, AI Software Engineer, etc.

How Will AIDS Change The Future?

It is not a question anymore that Artificial Intelligence is the prime need of the day and has a lot of potential in changing the world. Large volumes of data are generated every day across several organizations, and it is possible to make use of that data only with the help of Machine Learning and Deep Learning technologies. AI has proved to be extremely strong, and it still has many potentials. However, it will take us years to reach there.

Conclusion

In recent years, there has been a massive unraveling of the AI and Machine learning phenomena as they find hundreds of possibilities for their application of artificial intelligence in various fields. In fact, researchers started using AI and Machine learning to gain more insights into the recent global pandemic. This further marks the combined use of AI and Machine learning in the field of medical research.

Due to the pandemic, the demand for AI and ML engineers also increased in the IT sector. Even when the country witnessed massive job losses, the demand for jobs in AI and ML was least affected. Businesses are already on their way to giving more work-from-home options that will also require AI and ML professionals of engineering colleges. Alternatively, you can say, AI and ML have immense potential, and pursuing a career in the same will help you get some major benefits and an in-demand job.

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brexiiton · 1 year

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Europol Warns of Metaverse and AI Terror Threat

Phil Muncaster, 14 June 2023

New and emerging technologies like controversial AI, deepfakes and the metaverse could be utilized by terrorists and extremists to radicalize and recruit converts to their cause, Europol has warned.

The policing organization sounded the warning in its EU Terrorism Situation and Trend (TE-SAT) Report 2023 published today.

"Emerging online mediums, such as the metaverse, might be utilized for the dissemination of propaganda, recruitment and the coordination of terrorist and violent extremist activities," it noted.

"A similar development might be observed with open source decentralized platforms, as these are becoming more popular among terrorist and violent extremists."

While the metaverse threat is still on the horizon given its early stage of development, decentralized P2P apps used for propaganda are already causing law enforcers problems as they are harder to moderate and investigate, Europol argued.

The online environment lowers the bar for entering the world of terrorism and extremism, broadens the range of people that can become exposed to radicalization and increases the unpredictability of terrorism and extremism, the report added.

Europol also pointed to the potential use of deepfakes, augmented reality and conversational AI to enhance the efficiency of terrorist propaganda. Both the technologies and IoT tools can also be deployed in "more practical tasks such as the remote operation of vehicles and weapons used in attacks or setting up virtual training camps," it said.

While these emerging technologies are very much on the radar, current tools already being exploited by terrorist and extremist groups are end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging platforms and gaming-adjacent platforms for recruitment purposes and propaganda dissemination.

Both Islamic terror groups like IS and right-wing extremists exploit the latter - creating groups on gaming comms apps and "extremist utopias within popular video games" in order to appeal to younger recruits.

Digital currencies are also playing a role in helping to finance such groups while maintaining the anonymity of those contributing the funding, Europol said.

There were 28 completed, failed or foiled attacks recorded in the EU last year, during which four people lost their lives.

#metaverse #ai

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bestbusinessbitches · 1 year

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Understanding the basics of Artificial Intelligence

# Artificial Intelligence in Copywriting As technology continues to advance, the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in the world of copywriting cannot be ignored. AI has already been integrated into many aspects of our daily lives, from voice assistants to chatbots. And now, it's making its way into the world of content creation. AI-powered tools are being used to generate everything from product descriptions to blog posts, and the results are often surprising. While the idea of machines taking over the task of writing may seem daunting, AI is actually proving to be a valuable asset for copywriters. By automating certain aspects of the writing process, AI frees up time for writers to focus on more creative tasks. But what does this mean for the future of copywriting? Will AI eventually replace human writers altogether? How can we ensure that the content generated by AI is of high quality and relevance? These are just some of the questions that are being raised as AI continues to transform the world of copywriting. ## Understanding the Basics of Artificial Intelligence Before diving into the role of AI in copywriting, it's important to understand the basics of artificial intelligence. AI refers to the ability of machines to perform tasks that would typically require human intelligence, such as learning, problem-solving, and decision-making. This is achieved through the use of algorithms and machine learning, which allows the machine to learn from experience and improve its performance over time. There are two types of AI: narrow or weak AI and general or strong AI. Narrow AI is designed to perform a single task, such as recognizing speech or playing chess. General AI, on the other hand, is capable of performing any intellectual task that a human can. While narrow AI is already widely used in various industries, general AI is still in the early stages of development. ## The Benefits of Using AI in Copywriting The use of AI in copywriting offers several benefits to writers and businesses alike. One of the most significant benefits is the ability to save time. Writing high-quality content can be a time-consuming task, but AI-powered tools can generate content quickly and efficiently, freeing up time for writers to focus on other tasks. Another benefit is the ability to improve the accuracy and consistency of content. AI-powered tools can analyze data and generate content that is optimized for specific keywords and phrases, helping to improve search engine rankings and drive more traffic to a website. Additionally, AI can ensure that the content is consistent in tone and style, which is important for businesses that want to maintain a strong brand identity. Finally, AI can help to reduce costs associated with content creation. Hiring a team of writers can be expensive, but AI-powered tools can generate content at a fraction of the cost. This makes it an attractive option for businesses that want to create high-quality content on a budget. ## AI-Powered Writing Tools and Their Impact on the Industry There are several AI-powered writing tools available on the market today, each with its own unique features and capabilities. Some of the most popular tools include: ### 1. Grammarly Grammarly is an AI-powered writing assistant that helps writers to improve their grammar, spelling, and punctuation. The tool uses machine learning to analyze text and provide real-time suggestions for improvements. ### 2. Wordsmith Wordsmith is an AI-powered natural language generation (NLG) platform that can generate articles, reports, and other types of content. The tool uses templates to generate content based on specific data inputs. ### 3. Articoolo Articoolo is an AI-powered content creation platform that can generate articles on any topic. The tool uses natural language processing (NLP) to analyze text and generate unique content. These tools have had a significant impact on the copywriting industry, making it easier and more efficient to create high-quality content. However, there are concerns that the use of AI-powered tools could lead to a decrease in the quality of content, as well as the potential for plagiarism. ## The Future of Copywriting with AI The use of AI in copywriting is still in its early stages, but it is clear that it will continue to play a significant role in the industry. As AI-powered tools become more advanced, they will be able to generate more complex content, such as white papers and case studies. Additionally, AI will be able to analyze data and generate content that is tailored to specific audiences, helping businesses to better engage with their customers. However, there are concerns that the use of AI could eventually lead to the replacement of human writers. While AI can generate content quickly and efficiently, it lacks the creativity and nuance that human writers bring to the table. Additionally, there are ethical considerations to take into account, such as the potential for bias in AI-generated content. ## How to Ensure the Quality of Content Generated by AI To ensure that the content generated by AI is of high quality and relevance, it's important to use AI-powered tools in conjunction with human writers. While AI can automate certain aspects of the writing process, it's the human touch that brings creativity and nuance to the content. It's also important to carefully review and edit the content generated by AI. While AI can generate content quickly, it's not always perfect. Reviewing and editing the content can help to catch any errors or inaccuracies and ensure that the content is of high quality. Finally, it's important to use AI-powered tools that have been tested and proven to be effective. There are many AI-powered writing tools available on the market, but not all of them are created equal. It's important to do your research and choose tools that have a track record of success. ## Tips for Integrating AI into Your Copywriting Process If you're interested in integrating AI into your copywriting process, there are several tips that can help you get started: 1. Start small - Begin by using AI-powered tools for simple tasks, such as grammar and spelling checks. 2. Experiment with different tools - There are many AI-powered writing tools available, so it's important to experiment with different options to find the ones that work best for you. 3. Use AI in conjunction with human writers - To ensure the highest quality of content, it's important to use AI in conjunction with human writers. 4. Review and edit content generated by AI - While AI can generate content quickly, it's not always perfect. Reviewing and editing the content can help to catch any errors or inaccuracies and ensure that the content is of high quality. 5. Continuously evaluate and refine your process - As you begin to integrate AI into your copywriting process, it's important to continuously evaluate and refine your process to ensure that you're getting the best results. ## Examples of Successful AI-Powered Copywriting There are many examples of successful AI-powered copywriting, from product descriptions to news articles. One notable example is the Associated Press, which uses Wordsmith to generate thousands of earnings reports each quarter. The tool has helped the AP to increase the speed and accuracy of its reporting, while also freeing up reporters to focus on more creative tasks. Another example is the ecommerce company Alibaba, which uses AI-powered tools to generate product descriptions for its website. The tool has helped the company to create thousands of unique product descriptions in a fraction of the time it would take to do so manually. ## Ethical Considerations of Using AI in Copywriting As with any new technology, there are ethical considerations to take into account when using AI in copywriting. One of the biggest concerns is the potential for bias in AI-generated content. AI is only as unbiased as the data it's trained on, and if that data is biased, the content generated by AI will be as well. Additionally, there are concerns about the potential for AI to replace human writers. While AI can automate certain aspects of the writing process, it lacks the creativity and nuance that human writers bring to the table. This could lead to a decrease in the quality of content and the loss of jobs for writers. ## Conclusion - The Role of AI in the Future of Copywriting In conclusion, the role of AI in the future of copywriting is significant. AI-powered tools offer several benefits, including the ability to save time, improve accuracy and consistency, and reduce costs. However, it's important to use AI in conjunction with human writers to ensure the highest quality of content. Additionally, there are ethical considerations to take into account, such as the potential for bias in AI-generated content. As AI continues to advance, it's important to carefully evaluate and refine our use of this technology to ensure that we're getting the best results.

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buddyvibezbff · 1 year

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Understanding the basics of Artificial Intelligence

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oliviamiller048 · 1 year

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How AI is Changing the Future of Digital Marketing (2023)

With the advancement of technology, digital marketing has become an industry where AI-powered programs play a crucial role. To understand the future of digital marketing, we need to focus on these revolutionary changes and how they will shape the sector’s potential in 2023 and beyond. From automation to customer segmentation, find out how AI-powered digital marketing is making waves in cutting-edge tech.

The popularity of digital marketing has led to a rise in AI-powered tools and services. Here's what you need to know about this growing trend.

AI-powered digital marketing is a term used to describe the use of artificial intelligence in marketing. This can use AI to automate tasks, personalize messages, or even create new content.

AI-powered digital marketing is still in its early stages, but it's already having a major impact on how businesses market themselves online. For example, AI can be used to create more personalized ads that are better targeted to individual users. AI can also analyze customer data to identify trends and target specific demographics with tailored messages.

Some experts believe that AI will eventually replace human marketers altogether. However, most agree that AI will augment the work of marketing professionals, making them more efficient and effective at their jobs.

As AI-powered digital marketing grows more popular, businesses must stay up-to-date on the latest trends and best practices. Doing so will ensure they can take full advantage of this exciting new technology.

How AI is Changing Digital Marketing Now

Digital marketing has come a long way since the early days of the internet. But with the rise of artificial intelligence, it is poised to change even more. Here are five ways AI is changing digital marketing now:

More personalized content

With AI, marketers can create more personalized content for their target audiences. By understanding a person's preferences and interests, AI can help marketers deliver relevant and targeted content that is more likely to resonate with the individual.

Greater insights into customer behavior

Another benefit of AI is that it provides marketers with more significant insights into customer behavior. By analyzing data points such as online search queries and social media interactions, AI can help marketers better understand what their customers want and need. This insight can then be used to improve marketing strategies and campaigns.

Improved ad targeting

Advertising is another area where AI has a significant impact. Using data from customer profiles, AI can help identify individuals most likely to be interested in a particular product or service. This information can then be used to serve them targeted ads that are more likely to result in a conversion.

Automated campaign management

With the help of AI, marketers can now automate many of the tasks involved in managing digital campaigns. This includes sending automated and personalized emails via email marketing, keeping track of budgeting and spending data, optimizing ads for targeting and reach, and many other tasks.

Chatbots

Chatbots are one of the most visible manifestations of AI in digital marketing. Using natural language processing (NLP) technology, chatbots can quickly and accurately answer customer inquiries. They can even provide customers with product recommendations based on their interests and needs.

AI has allowed marketers to streamline their processes while delivering better results to their audiences. This is why many experts believe that AI will become increasingly important in digital marketing.

Benefits of AI in Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is an ever-changing landscape becoming increasingly complex as new technologies emerge. AI is one of the latest technologies to enter the digital marketing arena, and it holds great promise for transforming how marketers interact with customers and prospects. Here are some of how AI can be used in digital marketing:

Automated customer segmentation: AI can help marketers automatically segment customers based on their behavior, interests, and past interactions. This enables marketers to deliver more targeted and personalized messages that are more likely to resonate with each customer.

Predictive analytics: AI can be used to identify patterns in customer data to predict future behavior. This allows marketers to address customer needs before they even arise proactively.

Chatbots: Chatbots powered by AI can simulate human conversation, making it possible for businesses to provide 24/7 customer support without additional staff. Chatbots can also collect valuable data about customer preferences and trends.

Optimized content creation: AI can analyze large amounts of data to understand which topics are most popular with customers and what content is most likely to engage them. This information can then be used to produce content that is more likely to generate leads and conversions.

Challenges of Using AI in Digital Marketing

When it comes to using AI in digital marketing, there are a few challenges that businesses need to be aware of. First and foremost, AI can be quite expensive to implement and maintain. Additionally, building an effective AI system for marketing purposes requires a significant amount of data. And finally, businesses need to be careful not to rely too heavily on AI-powered marketing tools and techniques, as this could lead to problems.

Examples of AI in Action

As AI technology advances, so too makes its application to various aspects of digital marketing, from content creation to campaign management. Here are some examples of AI in action in the world of digital marketing:

Content Creation: AI can be used to generate realistic and meaningful article content, selection of imagery, and even copywriting. For example, OpenAI developed a tool called GPT-3 that can write entire articles on selected topics without human intervention.

Campaign Management: AI can be used to optimize ad campaigns in real time based on results achieved and user engagement data. For example, Google's AdWords platform uses machine learning algorithms to decide which ads should be shown to which users at what time.

Customer Segmentation: AI can be used to analyze customer data and identify important segments for targeted marketing campaigns. For example, Amazon's personalization engine creates customer "profiles" that are then used to deliver individualized recommendations and product placements.

Predictive Analytics: AI can be used to predict future trends and behaviors based on past data patterns. This information can then be used to decide marketing strategies and budgets. For example, Facebook uses predictive analytics to determine which users are most likely to engage with certain content or offers.

Natural Language Processing (NLP): AI can analyze and understand unstructured data such as customer conversations on social media or emails and survey responses for better insights into user needs and wants. For example, Alibaba's natural language processing system can accurately generate a reply after analyzing customer emails.

Knowledge and Skills Needed to Utilize AI in Digital Marketing

To utilize AI in digital marketing, marketers need to understand the technology and its potential applications for their business. Additionally, marketers need to be aware of the ethical considerations associated with using AI-powered tools and the potential impact on customer privacy. With these factors in mind, marketers who are looking to utilize AI in digital marketing should consider the following:

-The capabilities of AI-powered tools: What can AI-powered tools do for your business?

-The limitations of AI-powered tools: What can't AI-powered tools do for your business?

-The ethical implications of using AI: How might customers react to being marketed to by an AI system? What are the potential privacy implications of using AI in marketing?

-The impact of AI on customer privacy: How will customers' data be used if you employ an AI system in your marketing efforts?

Strategies for Implementing and Succeeding with AI in Digital Marketing

Start with small projects: When incorporating AI into your digital marketing strategy, it's important to start small. Independent studies have shown that 71% of enterprises believe implementing AI is complicated and time-consuming. However, this doesn't have to be the case. By starting with small projects and using simple tools, you can gradually introduce AI into your marketing strategy in a manageable and efficient way.

Set realistic expectations: When incorporating AI into your digital marketing strategy, it's important to set realistic expectations. This means AI will not be able to replace human labor overnight wholly – instead, it will supplement and enhance existing marketing efforts. With this in mind, it's important to focus on how AI can improve specific areas of your digital marketing strategy, such as customer segmentation or lead generation.

Be prepared for data privacy concerns: As with any new technology, there are bound to be some data privacy concerns when incorporating AI into your digital marketing strategy. However, these concerns can be easily addressed by ensuring that all collected data is properly secured and only used for the intended purposes. Moreover, many companies are already beginning to adopt "data ethics policies" to address these concerns head-on.

Partner with an experienced provider: While there are many benefits to incorporating AI into your digital marketing strategy, it can take time to stay up-to-date with the latest trends. This is why partnering with an experienced provider, such as a digital agency or specialist consultant, is important. Having an expert on hand ensures that your marketing strategy remains in line with the latest developments in AI technology.

Future Opportunities for AI and Digital Marketers

Digital marketers need to stay ahead of the curve regarding technology and trends. Here are four future opportunities for those who want to take advantage of AI-powered marketing:

Enhanced personalization: You can create more personalized content and experiences for your customers and prospects with AI. For example, you can use data from past interactions to better understand their needs and tailor your messaging accordingly.

Increased efficiency: Automating tasks with AI can free up time for other marketing activities. For instance, you can use chatbots to handle customer inquiries, which frees your team to focus on other initiatives.

Improved decision-making: AI can help you make better decisions by analyzing data faster and more accurately than humans can. For example, you can use AI to identify the most effective channels for reaching your target audience and improving marketing ROI.

More effective segmentation and targeting: AI can help you create more targeted campaigns by segmenting consumers based on their interests, behaviors, and demographic information. This can help you create campaigns that better resonate with the right people, resulting in improved customer engagement and higher conversion rates.

Conclusion

The rise of AI-powered digital marketing is an exciting development in business. It can offer marketers enhanced insights and predictive capabilities that were previously unimaginable. AI's ability to quickly process large amounts of data means it has already become an invaluable tool for understanding customer behavior, segmenting audiences, and optimizing campaigns for improved ROI. With promises of continued advances over the next few years, this technology looks set to revolutionize how businesses market themselves.

#digital marketing #ai #roi #future #email marketing

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sinceileftyoublog · 3 years

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Wobbly Interview: Going for Happy

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Thurston Moore Ensemble/Negativland band member Jon Leidecker has been releasing electronic music under the moniker Wobbly for over two decades now. In Chicago experimental label Hausu Mountain, he seems to have found kindred spirits, matching his far out idiosyncrasies. 2019′s Monitress and its follow-up, Popular Monitress, which came out earlier this month, are albums about and by machines, as Leidecker ran his music into pitch trackers and synth apps on his phones and tablets, embracing the errors and randomness that were produced along the way. While the source material on Monitress was mostly improvised, the songs on Popular Monitress are more structured and composed, resulting in songs like “Authenticated Krell”, which follows a comparatively clean synth arpeggio before being enveloped by texture, or “Lent Foot”, where the various instruments trail each other. It’s remarkable just how familiar certain sounds are even if not traditionally instrumental ones, like the typewriter clacks of “Illiac Ergodos 7!” or the zooming notes of the thumping title track. Blurring the lines between what’s instrument and what’s not, and even further, what’s composed music and what’s not, Popular Monitress is a defining statement for both Leidecker and Hausu.

I was able to ask Leidecker about various songs on the album and their inspirations. Read his answers below!

Since I Left You: You chose to write more structured songs this time around before running them through the pitch tracker. Do those nuggets of recognizable structures make the final product all the more disorienting?

Jon Leidecker: Hopefully! On both albums, the main thing is keeping the focus on just how live those pitch trackers are. It’s Monitress as long as you can hear how they’re listening. For years, it was strictly a piece for live performance--I needed to be improvising myself, and able to respond instantly, to really underline just how spontaneous the machine responses are. So the first record tried to keep more of that sense of flow. Large stretches of it are simply baked down from stereo recordings of concerts & radio performances of it. Overdubbing more layers of trackers seemed legal, as long all the voices were following that one original sound.

Of course, when you play a tune, something composed or even quantized, it definitely becomes easier to hear what they’re doing. The exact same code running on each phone will respond in very different ways to the same source audio, and you get a chorus of individual voices. They play a lot of wrong notes, but oddly, if you feed the trackers lots of consonant, major chords, it stops being dissonance, and you can tell they’re going for happy. You hear these weird things, trying to sing in unison, and..the result is just pure delight. Weirdly emotional! What’s a mistake? What’s music?

SILY: How did you come up with the song titles? For instance, is there anything particularly Appalachian about "Appalachian Gendy"?

JL: They’re mostly mashed up references to landmark works in the field of generative & algorithmic composition, from the 50’s up to the early 90’s. The recent push of stories on AI musical tools seems to be about automation and labor-saving, but the field of how to develop tools for more creative ends goes back all the way to Bebe and Louis Barron going to the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics and designing their first self-oscillating feedback circuit.

So while my tracks aren’t really in the musical style of the works they reference--something like “Appalachian Gendy”, which sprung up a fantasy Spiegel/Xenakis tribute, got paired to that stompdown track, and once it did, I added a solo on iGendyn.

SILY: To what extent is your music here inspired by the inner workings of the brain?

JL: Once you get a grip on just how simply neurons and synapses interact, how reassuringly physical thinking is, the electronic music I’ve always found most inspiring often involve feedback systems, self-playing devices, generative music, things that learn rather than settle. Music that helps you model thought. The whole East Coast/West Coast 60’s divide in synth design boiled down to Moog reducing your options until you could easily dial in what you already know you want, and Buchla designing uncertainty machines to be networked together until they approach the complexity of an unknown brain.

SILY: "Synaptic Padberg" and "Every Piano" have moments of recognizable instruments as opposed to alien instruments (strings and piano, respectively). Was that just a product of the errors/randomness of the music-making, or purposeful?

JL: It's supposed to sound orchestral, so I hit my Mellotron and Chamberlin apps pretty hard with this piece. Not like anything remains plausibly real once they're getting hammered by the trackers. That is a real grand piano, however: me playing the tune at SnowGhost Music in Montana. Brett Allen deserves an engineering credit, but I also wanted the first listen to make you wonder.

SILY: There's almost a funky rhythm to "Motown Electronium". Do you envision folks dancing to this record?

JL: Would have been plain wrong to put that title on an unworthy beat. What would a room full of people dancing to this even be like? Maybe in Baltimore.

SILY: Do you think "Training Lullaby" is what a computer trying to write a lullaby would sound like?

JL: Not that relaxing, is it? That’s ten seconds pulled from a five minute live improvisation, just a little burst of fury in the middle. Which I’ve heard enough now that I can sing along to it; so now, for me, it is calming.

I finally had to admit to myself that I’m a fan of the OpenAI Jukebox stuff. It’s right at that stage where their results are still primitive enough to remain a little mysterious. All the context and relationships intrinsic to what humans call music is irrelevant to those GANs. They don’t need culture to make music, they just need waveforms. What does it tell us that simple pattern analysis and brute number crunching on a large enough data set can produce those sounds? They’re training us. I have twelve hours of their Soundcloud dump ripped to my phone, and I play it a lot, though I wouldn’t play it for anyone under four. Can definitely sing along to some of the weirder ones by now.

SILY: How did you approach the order of tracks on the record? I'm struck by, for instance, the chaos of "Grossi Polyphony" following the comparative lull of "Every Piano".

JL: Just trying to show the range, and keep the surprises coming. Perpetual variety becomes monotony so quickly, so there is a very careful balancing act to play between shorter and longer tracks. I like a record where on first listen, any new section that begins, you feel like there are no guarantees how long it’ll last, eight seconds or eight minutes. Even things that sound like they should be songs: no guarantees. I still remember the first time I heard The Faust Tapes as a teenager.

SILY: Did you actually use musical dice to write "Wurfelspiel"?

JL: “Wurfelspiel” is just name-dropping Mozart’s generative piece--again, a real piano, but no musical dice involved.

SILY: The beats towards the end of the album--the pseudo hip-hop of "Cope By Design", techno of "Dusthorn Sawpipe", krautrock of "Help Desk"--seem to me to be far more propulsive than anything else here. Do you see a connection between those tracks?

JL: The album hits you with all these miniatures in the middle to keep things moving, and those three are the last little barrage of them before the shift into the final stretch with the longer, more hypnotic pieces. Can be tough to sequence an album when you’ve got so many short tracks, but it’s also total freedom.

SILY: How did you like getting the Hausu Mountain album art treatment?

JL: Totally family. All the Monitress packaging has always been iPhone panorama mode artifacts, visual glitches not entirely unlike what my phone’s trackers do to what they hear. I gave one of those images to [Hausu Mountain co-founder Max Allison] to work with the cover of the first Monitress, and he sent back this image, saying, “Here’s the initial stage: Your photo reduced to color blocks I’ll carefully render out later.” So when the second hyper-detailed one came back in a more proper Hausu style, they already seemed like a sequence, and this second one was already in place, so it all clicked. Any version of Monitress, the music is different, but it’s always the same piece. I’m really happy they asked me for something. [Label co-founder Doug Kaplan] and Max are just coming from the good place.

SILY: Are you doing any live streams or socially distant shows any time soon?

JL: Multi-location live streams are a blast. The time modulation inherent in all streaming is deeply psychedelic. The kind of listening you have to do when you know that the relationship of sounds together in time is different for each musician involved? I’m learning utterly new tricks, and it’s astonishing just how live the result is. I sat in on a live stream with Thurston Moore Group a few months ago, the four of them in London, and me hooked up to an amp not far from where I normally am when I play with them. And everyone agreed: It felt like I was there, right up until the instant I quit the app.

I’ve been pre-recording some home live sets for Hausu, Curious Music and High Zero Foundation. Negativland is putting together an hour long performance with Sue-C for the Ann Arbor Film Festival in late March. I finished an album mostly recorded outdoors with my old friend Cheryl E. Leonard for Gilgongo, and we’re going to try to a few outdoor concerts, too.

SILY: What else are you currently working on/what's next?

JL: The second album with Sagan, with Blevin Blectum & J Lesser, is coming out in late April. That one took 14 years to finish. There’s a trio record with Thomas Dimuzio and Anla Courtis coming out on Oscarson. Doing a revision of the last episode of my podcast on sampling music, Variations, to incorporate that OpenAI music. Some Negativland releases tying together the last two albums. There are about four of five other albums that might be done, though it takes time to be sure.

SILY: Anything you've been listening to, reading, or watching lately?

JL: This month has been Maryanne Amacher’s collected writings, Keeping Together in Time by William H. McNeill, Ministry For The Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, important even with happy ending. Interview with Karl Friston - Of Woodlice And Men. Listening to a lot of “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Xenakis & Lang Elliott, and last week every Ghédalia Tazartès album in reverse chronological order. I don’t care what anybody says: That guy’s immortal.

SILY: Anything I didn't ask about you want to say?

JL: Thank you for your questions!

Popular Monitress by Wobbly

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zombiescantfly · 5 years

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Words About Games: Unreal Tournament (Epic Megagames, 1999)

In 2291, in an attempt to control violence among deep-space miners, the New Earth Government legalized no-holds-barred fighting.

291 years earlier, I heard that for the first time. Unreal Tournament begins with a narrated flythrough explaining two very simple things: there is a Tournament, and you are going to win it. After the lonely melancholy of Unreal, that's a pretty abrupt pivot. Why, after getting through most of the 90s with platformers, pinball, and fighting games, did Epic Megagames barrel in headfirst to the multiplayer arena shooter market, a playground run exclusively by industry already-giant id Software?

Because they wanted to.

As I mentioned in the Unreal essay, that game's multiplayer was a fun shell filled with horrible, horrible problems. Epic set to fixing it, but realized that beyond some quick and dirty surface-level patches, there wasn't a lot they could do within the same scope. So they broke away from a simple expansion pack and landed on creating a full separate release by the name of Unreal Tournament.

Unreal Tournament, UT99 from now on, was released on November 23, 1999, to an almost absurd level of praise. Quake 3 Arena, id’s latest offering in the Quake franchise and first multiplayer-only title, would come out just over a week later on December 2, pitching the two games into a deathmatch of their own which still rages to this day almost 20 years later.

Let's talk about Quake a bit. Shooters, up until around the time the first Quake came out and probably still after that, were commonly referred to as ‘Doom clones’ because, well, many were. Any unambitious dev could buy an engine license, whip up some sprites on a lunchbreak, and ship a game. There's a parallel to be drawn between that era and the current ongoing avalanche of Unity and Unreal asset flips, but you can turn to others for opinions on all that.

Quake was, famously, id Software’s followup to Doom 2, and an early frontrunner of fully-3d shooters. It was so popular and noteworthy that it even caused the term Doom Clone to fall away in favor of Quake Clone. Quake expanded the popularity of online play, and saw the creation of the some of the first AI bots made exclusively for deathmatch. Quake 2 came along not too far after and pulled in even more interest. If you remember from my Unreal essay, that was when it grabbed my own interest, and I became a frequent over-the-shoulder spectator of many a Quake 2 deathmatch.

But then, UT99. When I first played Unreal Tournament, I was blown away. By the bots. Meaning that they killed me a lot. I was very bad at it. I didn't even strafe back then, just ran forward and turned with the mouse. But I learned.

UT99 is actually quite an accommodating game. Bots have 9 skill levels ranging from drooling idiot to a fittingly-named godlike, and I remember bumping them up a level at a time over the years. UT’s bots were one of its largest selling points back then, and the cornerstone of the Tournament part of its name.

The titular Tournament in Unreal Tournament is a series of botmatches of increasing difficulty over the game’s five primary gamemodes: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Domination, and Assault. A final series of three 1v1 matches caps off the Tournament, the third of which pits you against the Big Bad Reigning Champ, a robot named Xan Kriegor.

There were a handful of firsts in that short bit, so let's take a look.

As stated, Quake 2 was the de facto king of online shooters at the time. But Quake 2, for all its fame, only had three gamemodes available: deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture the flag. Unreal had dabbled with alternative styles of deathmatch and team deathmatch, but all of them were, more or less, the same gamemode, save one. In a unique take on King of the Hill, the first player to score a kill got a permanent damage boost until they were killed, at which point that buff was transferred to their killer. Killing the King awarded more points, matches were first to X points, you get the idea. RtNP added Cloak Match, a take on this KotH concept where instead of a damage boost, players fought for permanent partial invisibility and infinite jump boots.

Unreal Tournament was a little more ambitious than just reflavoring deathmatch, however. Domination used its own unique rotation of maps centered around controlling three points. Your team scores one point per every couple of seconds, per point held. Touching a point is enough to flip control of it to your side, and the result is a fun, frantic match with enough additional focus to guide it away from just another deathmatch. Map control becomes something more than just controlling various weapon spawns, and demands you keep your attention between the three points. Random respawns instead of near your team’s current territory and the instant capture of points meant the game never ground down to just being spawncamped, and helped reduce the prevalence of one-sided victories. Domination was great, the extra effort put in to creating its own category of maps was great, and games today still use the gamemode. That said, Destiny 2 really needs to make capture instant and not have you sit around for 5 seconds in a tiny room, like come on.

Domination may have been new for the time, and DM, TDM, and CTF made their own waves that I'll get into later, but Assault is what really caught people's attention. Assault was an attack and defense mode where one team was tasked with completing a series of varied objectives, while the defenders tried to stop them. The most similar thing we get in games now is pushing a cart down a predetermined path in TF2 or Overwatch. Payload gamemodes in those games are similar in the sense that one team must progress down a path to get to a specific location, and I suppose it might come across as a streamlining of the idea, but Assault is just more interesting.

UT99 shipped with seven Assault maps, and each one presented a different scenario. Assault was not just replacing the objective on an existing map, the same as Domination had its own maps. Each one had a little story it presented, from the attempted hijacking of a supersonic train, assaulting an ancient fortress on an alien planet, sabotaging an underwater research facility, stealing a Navy battleship, escaping a medieval castle, destroying an experimental battle tank, and even a recreation of the D-Day landing. Assault maps varied in how linear they were, with maps like Guardia, HiSpeed, and Overlord being fairly straightforward, to the more open-ended OceanFloor and Rook. It was, by design, an asymmetrical experience, but that design went so far as to change in-level as the attackers pushed further and further in. On HiSpeed, for example, the attackers start in a helicopter hovering over the rear of the train, and drop down largely uncontested. There's a full car where they can grab weapons and powerups, and then they reach where the defenders have spawned.

As objectives are met and various places in the map are reached by the attackers, spawn points start to change. On the same map, attackers spawn with a serviceable loadout of shock rifles and pulse guns (we'll get to the weapons later), both good options for the mixed-distance encounter they'll be facing as they move towards the next car. The defenders, however, spawn with access to flak cannons and rippers, which in the close quarters of the car’s interior are absolutely brutal. Once the attackers push far enough in to it, though, that car becomes their spawn point and the defenders are moved further back, thus giving the attackers access to those weapons for the next part of the map.

The same sort of design echoes throughout all seven Assault maps, and it creates a varied and frantic experience that was new at the time and still hasn't really been copied. The feeling of actually taking part in an event in the game’s world added so much to even the relatively sparse setting, and it remains a great example of an excellent piece of very quiet but highly effective worldbuilding.

The other gamemodes were again, team and free-for-all deathmatch, and as standard as that was at the time, UT99 made some weighty impressions on the genre. At the time of Quake 2’s release, it was common practice to just repurpose singleplayer campaign levels as the multiplayer maps. Quake 2 would get its own suite of maps designed explicitly for multiplayer later in its life, and Unreal shipped with 14 multiplayer-only maps, with a further 9 added later as free updates. UT99 shipped with multiple dozens of maps, each one presenting a different take on design and execution. You have a standard collection of flat-ish arenas, some truly impressive vertical design, maps with stage hazards, big maps, small maps, maps with areas of low gravity, and maps with secret passages leading to hidden weapon spawns. A handful of Unreal’s maps were even remade for UT99, and two in particular became series mainstays - Deck 16 and Curse. Both are still thought of as iconic maps, and for very good reason. They're well-balanced and play to the strengths of the game they're in while also, going back to Unreal’s bit here, feeling like they're a real space.

Because while UT99 may be a multiplayer-only fragfest with no real story, it has lore.

The opening narration is just a small bit of fluff, but it sets up a whole lot that the various designers had a ton of fun expanding on. Official weapon descriptions in the manual talk about the (in-game) real-world applications of each, and even set some up as not even being explicitly for combat. The Translocator, a personal teleporter by way of launching tiny disks, is a repurposed tool given to miners to help escape cave-ins. The GES Biorifle is a vacuum cleaner for toxic sludge instead of dust. The Impact Hammer is a jackhammer but sideways. The in-universe justification for those few weapons doesn't mean anything to the gameplay, but given that the Tournament was set up by Liandri Mining Corporation, it adds a bit of fun sense-making to the whole thing.

Maps, too, are part of that lore package. Each map throughout the Tournament ladder has a short description, and it's almost always about what this particular arena’s place in the world is. Most boil down to “this is a site built for the Tournament” or “Liandri bought this and made it a Tournament arena,” but it's about the tiny details hidden in the lines. Deck 16 is a toxic sludge refinery, but it's also a single deck of the spaceship Gaetano, rented out to Liandri whenever it's in drydock. Curse is an ancient temple that was an archaeological site until Liandri bought it after funding ran out. Arcane Temple is a Nali worship site on Na Pali left abandoned after the Skaarj invaded. Oblivion is a Liandri passenger ship that tricks Tournament entrants by being their first arena. Hyperblast, the final stage of the Tournament, is Xan Kriegor’s personal spaceship made specifically to be an arena.

The whole thing paints the Liandri Mining Corporation as this quirky half-malicious corporate giant, as big and influential as any sci-fi megacorp but out of an innocent love for their decidedly not-innocent game. It's a world where humanity spent seven days on the brink of destruction at the hands of the Skaarj, where the Corporation Wars tore entire planets apart, and where despite that everyone can get over it, crack some beers, and watch people blow each other away on live television, kept safe by technology that respawns them within seconds.

Character backgrounds, too, drop hints in their two to three sentence lengths. The bots you fight against or with all have tiny snippets of who they are, making reference to revolts, arrests, rebellions, other worlds, secret government experiments, and revenge.

The important thing to take away from this is that all of this was put in but none of it had to be. It doesn't affect the game and it's not even immediately noticeable unless you let every map and character description load before entering a Tournament match. Just going to map select for a practice session/instant action game doesn't show the same descriptions, so you have to go through the singleplayer ladder. It's work put in that shows a genuine and earnest excitement for the world the devs had created, and I still get a smile thinking about it. Unreal Tournament is such a weird celebration of every gritty science fiction trope, but turns them all on their heads to create a world for this game that feels exactly as expansive as it isn't. Because Unreal Tournament doesn't have anything to do with the lore it hides in all these corners, it's just a multiplayer shooter with no story beyond “kill better than the other guys.” And boy do they ever make that part feel great.

For better or worse, Wolfenstein 3D cemented FPS weapon progression. Ever since and with only a few minor alterations here and there, the loadout progression is melee weapon, bad pistol, automatic weapon, shotgun (though those sometimes switch position), a better version of one or both of those, some kind of explosive option, sniper rifle (that was a later addition), and then a superweapon of some kind. From Doom to Quake to our old nemesis Half-Life to our slightly newer nemesis Halo to Call of Duty, you get those weapons in roughly that order.

So let's talk about Unreal again for a second. I didn't mention that game's weapons because I wanted to bring the whole discussion in at once, but it does require me to go back in time a year and talk about where the series landed on its own weapons. The first thing to know about Unreal is that it was not immune to the Holy Progression of Gun, but it did make some incredibly noticeable changes. Unreal saw a videogame gun, famous for being a thing you can left click on men with, and asked “what if you could also right click on men?”

I'm moving a rough sort of progression, so be aware that this is only the general order you get these guns in. In Unreal, the first weapon you pick up is the Dispersion Pistol, a projectile-firing semi-auto gun that doesn't do a whole lot of damage. One fun thing about it is that its projectiles cast a real-time light on the environment so you can use it as a way to peek into dark areas before going in them with your vulnerable body. But another thing about the Dispersion Pistol is its alt fire, where you hold down the right mouse button to charge up a shot which then acts essentially as a rocket launcher shot - it deals better damage, it deals splash damage, and it can gib enemies. In-universe, the Dispersion Pistol is a Skaarj weapon, and you can also find hidden upgrades for it that boost the damage of both firemodes at the cost of taking more ammo per shot. Luckily, as your holdout weapon, the Dispersion Pistol recharges its ammo passively.

The second weapon you get is the automag, a basic hitscan pistol. Primary fire shoots a fairly accurate shot, alt fire has you hold the gun sideways to increase the fire rate at the cost of accuracy. It's dumb and I love it to this day.

Third up, the Tarydium Stinger, a projectile-based minigun with an alt fire that acts as a projectile shotgun. Here's where the lines start to get a bit blurred, but we're not totally out of the usual progression just yet.

After the Stinger you get the ASMD Shock Rifle, a famously curious gun that, as its primary fire, shoots a hitscan beam, and shoots a fast-moving projectile orb as its alt fire, trading perfect precision and speed for a little bit of splash damage. The thing about it is that if you shoot the orb with the beam you get a giant explosion that does an absolute ton of damage.

Moving from that piece of sweet hardware brings us to the GES Biorifle, a rapid-fire goop-throwing mine layer with a charged shot as its alt fire.

Then, the Eightball Launcher, a rocket launcher that has not two but four firemodes. Click primary fire to shoot a rocket, fast moving and with splash damage. Hold primary fire to charge up to six rockets that fire in a spread pattern, or click alt fire while charging to shoot them in a spiral formation. Also, you can get a mild lock-on effect by holding your mouse cursor over an enemy for about half a second. Alt fire is the same as primary but with grenades - click alt fire once to lob one, hold to charge up to six. The grenades bounce around for a set period of time, and also blow up on contact with an enemy.

Then possibly the series’ most famous weapon, the Flak Cannon. Primary fire is a projectile-based shotgun that fires individual shards that bounce around the environment for a bit, allowing you to fire around corners or even up at the ceiling to bank a shot over cover. Alt fire is another grenade launcher, though this one fires its shells at a shallower angle, a higher velocity, has a smaller up-front splash radius, and still creates little bits of flak that bounce around for a short time. This gun is my and many other people’s favorite gun in videogames.

The Razorjack is a strange gun that fires disks that bounce around the environment at scarily high velocities, and even have the ability to decapitate enemies if you hit their head, a useful feature in the Skaarj-infested levels where you first find it. Alt fire is a tricky system that lets you influence the path the disk takes, though its high velocity, bad turning radius, and small size makes “influence” a more appropriate word than “guide.”

Next is the Rifle, a high-powered hitscan primary fire with an alt fire that zooms in. Headshotting enemies decapitates them but other than that it's just a sniper rifle, let's move on.

Finally, Unreal has the Minigun, a hitscan bullet-spewing beast that shows up near the end of the game, leaving you with just barely too little time to get to use it as much as you want and also to realize that hey, it's just a minigun. Primary fire shoots with a short spool-up time, alt fire shoots faster but less accurately. Unfortunately this does not make you hold the Minigun sideways like the Automag.

So that was Unreal’s loadout, and it made some big waves at the time. Physics-based projectiles? Well sure, Quake had the bouncy grenade launcher, but the Flak Cannon and Razorjack made being aware of and using the environment second nature to players. The ASMD’s ability to produce a BFG shot on demand if you could combo properly was amazing. And the upgradeable nature of the Dispersion pistol made what was usually a loadout slot reserved for being sad about having to use a legitimate late-game complement to your arsenal.

So it stands to reason that Unreal Tournament barely changed it.

UT99’s arsenal did change a little bit, but not too drastically. Most changes were to damage or fire rate, and every weapon got a new model. Some weapons were slightly renamed, like the Automag becoming the Enforcer or the ASMD receiving its full title of ASMD Shock Rifle, the Eightball Launcher was just called the Rocket Launcher, the Rifle became the Sniper Rifle, and the Razorjack was renamed the Ripper.

The next level of changes was tweaking some alt fires. The biggest change here was the new Ripper losing its guided blade in favor of an alt fire that shot an explosive disk. Unlike the primary fire, it didn't bounce, and while it had only about half the splash radius of the Rocket Launcher proper, its fire rate and projectile speed were both much faster. Other than that, the only change to another gun was the Sniper Rifle getting a thematically appropriate overlay when you zoomed in, instead of Unreal’s Rifle not displaying anything. Additionally, because it seems to fit here more than the next bit, if you manage to find another Enforcer lying on the ground, you can pick it up and dual wield. It's pretty rad.

Larger changes came in the removal of both the Stinger and the Dispersion Pistol, and the addition of the Impact Hammer, Pulse Gun, and the series’ first superweapon, the Redeemer.

I'm personally a bit conflicted about trading the Stinger out for the Minigun. On one hand, UT99’s Minigun is a great piece of visual design - massive, chunky, and bold, with the added flair of seeing your arm holding onto a forward grip to really sell the vibe of that one scene in Predator. On the other hand, there's something to be said about a projectile weapon over a hitscan one, especially since so many high-powered hitscan weapons exist in the game already. But at the same time, UT99 does have an answer to the automatic projectile weapon, the Pulse Gun.

The Pulse Gun should be instantly familiar to anyone with a passing understanding of id Software’s early titles. Primary fire is just the Pulse Rifle from Doom, and alt fire is the Thunderbolt from Quake. But put together, married in this suitcase-sized brick of green polygons? A thing of beauty.

Let me at least address the Impact Hammer before moving on: it's a melee weapon you can charge up. It'll kill someone pretty good if you charge it up and manage to make contact. It has a pretty fun and inspired visual design but ultimately the only reason it's there is because you can run out of ammo with the Enforcer you spawn with. The end.

Alright, the Redeemer. The Redeemer is a man-portal nuclear warhead launcher, kind of like the Fat Man from Fallout 3 except way, way cooler. Primary fire launches a relatively slow-moving projectile that, on contact with anything, explodes in a shockwave that does enough damage to instantly gib anyone without 199 health and a Shield Belt powerup. It goes through walls, too. It's a very good superweapon. Making it better is its alt fire, where you take personal control of the missile as it travels, allowing you to guide it around the map with a surprising degree of maneuverability. The BFG may have a classic flair, but the Redeemer took the idea of a superweapon to a whole other level.

So how did all of these weapons actually play together? How did an arsenal designed for and balanced around a singleplayer game with fixed enemy spawns translate to a multiplayer arena? Quite well, in fact. Epic didn't design the game in a vacuum, and as Quake 2 was the reigning champ at the time, they didn't have to look far to see what worked and what could be changed for the better.

UT99 plays fast, hard, and unrelenting. People load into a map and immediately start running around picking up weapons and letting the lead fly. Now, it's time for my bias to show a bit. I only ever watched Quake 2 multiplayer, but I have in fact played Quake 3 and Quake Live, as well as a handful of hours of Quake Champions which I know isn't really comparable but it uses the same weapons so I'm still mentioning it. UT is my series, I have a preference for it, and this next bit is all my own opinion and observation.

Quake only has three weapons.

Quake is a game where movement is fast, projectiles are fast, and time to kill is fast. It's a fast game. But it's so fast that only three weapons end up mattering - the rocket launcher, railgun, and thunderbolt. They're the three highest-damage weapons in the game and they make up pretty much the entirety of its arsenal. Quake matches inevitably all play out as taking potshots at each other with rockets as everyone strafejumps around like crazy, switching to the railgun if someone manages to be in the open for more than half a second, and swapping to the thunderbolt if you manage to get close enough that another character model takes up more than a handful of pixels on your screen.

Quake is a very fast and chaotic game, and I'm not saying that this kind of play isn't skillful, it's just so fast that actual duels never really happen, and people just kind of end up taking damage from one end of the map when they're on the other. Quake’s other weapons just may as well not exist, because if you find yourself using your starting shotgun, the nailgun, or any other weapon you want to be close for, you're likely doing so in range of someone's Thunderbolt and that's not a race you're going to win.

It's a difficult point to make, so let me move back to UT and why I prefer it. UT is a small but noticeable bit slower than Quake in a way that I feel greatly benefits it. Overall, it comes down to bringing the action in a little closer, really making the fights seem more personal, and really giving players more of a chance to dance around each other rather than hopping around the level on their own accord until they find each other by chance. Projectiles are both slightly slower and much more visible than in Quake, so trying to slam a rocket into someone's face from three hundred meters isn't really going to happen. So, from further away, you'll want to use a hitscan weapon, but since your target will be smaller they'll be harder to hit. Unless you want to zoom in with the Sniper Rifle, but then you lose a bit of awareness of your immediate surroundings. Close up, the Flak Cannon is king, but its range is short enough to matter. The Pulse Gun’s alt fire is just the Thunderbolt, and it'll tear someone apart pretty handily, to say nothing of putting the Minigun into overdrive with its own alt fire. Even flipping your Enforcer sideways will get bullets into someone quickly, and with fancy enough footwork you can save yourself from a gruesome fate with the starting gun. Or, if you're trying to keep someone away, quickly laying down a gooey minefield with the Biorifle works just as well as filling a hallway with a dozen bouncing Ripper blades.

Every gun in UT99 can kill someone, and not just in theory. The game balances each of its weapons almost perfectly, and nothing ever feels totally useless or has an obvious better version (I am not counting the Impact Hammer or Enforcer in this statement). Jumping over or dodging away from rockets to close with the Pulse Gun’s alt fire is just as reasonable as forcing someone to switch away from their Flak Cannon by retreating backwards as your Biorifle makes it impossible for them to safely advance. Lobbing a Flak alt fire over that minefield is alway an option though, so be ready to get out of the way, and maybe pull out your Shock Rifle to push them backwards. A fully stocked Minigun can keep an approach locked off, but a quick sniper bullet right to the face will put an end to it.

Alright, admittedly the Biorifle is historically a bit ignored, and the Ripper didn't even show up in subsequent games, but both still had a purpose. I, personally, am a staunch defender of the Biorifle’s utility as an area denial tool, and the ability to charge its alt fire will instantly kill someone no matter their health and shield level, if you can hit them. It's certainly better in team gamemodes like Assault or CTF, though. But just shooting at people with the weapons does not an arena shooter make. For there to be the proper levels of frantic action, movement needs to have a strong focus.

As in Quake, you'll want to get familiar with your spacebar. Strafe jumping isn't a thing as far as constantly upping your own speed, but it sure does make you harder to hit, and getting decent at dodging rockets always helps. Double tap a movement key to do a quick dodge in that direction, useful not just for avoiding projectiles but for snaking down corridors. On an elevator? Jump just before it reaches the top to get a massive boost and go flying. The Impact Hammer isn't ideal as a weapon, but a quick blast downward makes a decent stand-in for a rocket jump, if at the cost of significantly more self-damage. Capping it all off is the Translocator, the aforementioned teleporting-disk-thrower. Primary fire to shoot a disk in a pretty generous arc, alt fire to teleport to it. Disks emit light and can be destroyed, if you teleport while carrying a flag you drop it, and yes, you do fall faster than the disk travels upward. Truth be told, I usually play with the Translocator turned off, but that's mainly because the bots, as good as they are at the rest of the game, are less than stellar at putting those disks where they want, often leading to a cluster of them bouncing their shot off a wall just inches under the ledge they want up to, and not taking any action until they get it. I think it has to do with the accuracy modifiers based on bot skill level, but I'm not sure.

The bots are great in every other respect, though. Sure, they'll never actually replace a human player, but they're more than good enough for a few hundred hours of offline play. All the tricks the Skaarj demonstrated in Unreal are on display again, and tuned up to use every weapon. Bots jump and dodge, retreat if they're low on health, make decisions about what weapon to use based on their proximity to you as well as their own inventories, switch between firemodes when it makes sense, and plenty else. Upping the bot difficulty doesn't just make them do more damage or give them more health (it doesn't even do that in the first place), it makes them smarter. Or ‘smarter’ if you really care - it changes their reaction times and how accurate they are, how aggressively they'll act, and even how good they are at using the weapons beyond just aiming. A low-level bot might not get close enough to hit you with the Pulse Gun’s alt fire, or will use a Rocket Launcher in close quarters with all the risks of splash damage and self-death that entails. Higher difficulty bots will bank Flak shots off walls and bounce grenades around corners, lay fields of Biorifle goop, or be deadly-accurate with a sniper rifle from above.

The bots are what really put UT99 firmly on the ‘classic’ shelf, because its contemporaries just didn't offer the same thing. Again, Quake 2 had bots, but they served the purpose of being moving targets and not much else. Driving UT’s bots was a dead-simple, if tedious to implement, system. If you'll indulge me, I'm gonna pull back the hood and reveal the not-at-all-secret ways Unreal Tournament made all of its bots so good at playing each map.

All over a map, there are invisible waypoints hand-placed by the designer. The goal is to make a rough trail of waypoints to each part of the map. Bots see each waypoint and have the ability to travel in a wide radius around each. Weapons, ammo, health, armor, and special powerups all act as special waypoints that a bot will see and travel to if they don't already have what that pickup is. Players and other bots are considered waypoints as well, and when all that comes together, a bot will very intuitively move around the level. Placing a waypoint higher in the air will make a bot jump to reach it, so having them move over obstacles is simple. Like I said, it only requires a loose sort of web across the level, as the world geometry itself is also something a bot sees. Going around a corner or a box in the middle of a room is no issue provided the waypoints are good enough.

So now that you know how the sausage is made, what does that mean for the game? Well, quite a lot. Bot support is built into every single one of the maps UT99 shipped with, which is no small feat considering the base game came with 53 maps across four gamemodes (deathmatch and team deathmatch use the same maps), with a further 30 maps added for every gamemode but Assault over the course of four free downloadable bonus packs.

Every single one of those is playable, to this day, offline with a complement of bots just as ready to rock as they were almost twenty years ago. And that's not event counting the thousands of user-made maps still available for download, but we'll talk about modding in a bit. Because right now, it's time to talk about another excellent thing present on each map - the music.

Returning from Unreal are indisputable gods of music Alexander Brandon and Michiel van den Bos, who trade the previous game's subdued alien score for a soundtrack full of some of the boppin’est, crunchiest, hypest EDM tracks of the late 90s. (Can you tell I don't know anything about music?)

Run, GoDown, and Organic provide the upbeat bleeps and bloops to murder by; Save Me, Razorback, and Superfist let you rock out with your shock (rifle) out; while Forgone Destruction, Skyward Fire, and The Course chill things out a bit so you can focus on getting sick headshots. The quality of the music in Unreal Tournament is impossible to overstate, just as it was in Unreal. Brandon and van den Bos are unrelentingly good at their jobs, and the mishmash of styles all grinds together across UT99’s broad palette of maps like butter full of shrapnel. It's good, is what I'm saying. The music's really good. Listen to it. Please.

Stage music is something I personally miss from shooters, if you'll indulge another tangent. I love hearing the gameworld as interpreted by the composers, it adds so much to the whole package, and we just don't really get it anymore. The rise of the modern military shooter in 2007 with the runaway success of Call of Duty 4 kind of slammed the door on stage music with a tactical-lite focus on identifying footsteps and directional fire, but even Halo’s deathmatches were filled with a blank silence. Or Halo 2, I suppose, since Halo 1 didn't have online play, except for the PC version, which did. No stage music though, that's the main takeaway.

UT99 had a truly odd mix of contemporaries, from the last days of Quake 2 and the imminent release of Quake 3 a week after UT itself came out, to Half-Life creating a mod scene in its multiplayer, to Halo a year or so later. The turn of the century would bring with it the generally-accepted death of the arena shooter, but they all went out kicking, and the few hundred people still populating UT99 servers to this day are a testament to its tight, clean design and no-frills focus on gameplay.

Unless, of course, they're playing a mod.

Truth be told, I never actually played much UT99 online. I was very bad, you see, and when I got better my horrible social anxiety had progressed to the point where the idea of even playing a game with faceless strangers was terrifying. I was 8. But anyway, modding! You may have, in your travels as someone who presumably plays videogames - an assumption I'm making because you're reading this - heard of the Unreal Engine. In a hidden bit of Trivia, Unreal was the first game on the Unreal Engine, and Unreal Tournament also used it. Wild!

Along with the game itself, both releases also shipped with the Unreal Editor, or UnrealEd. UnrealEd is the exact development tool the fine folks at Epic Megagames used to make those games, and they just casually handed them to the players. The result echoes throughout the game industry to this day, and while Epic was hardly the only developer supporting mods, they were the first to do so on that kind of level. As a result, there are thousands if not tens of thousands of user-made maps scattered around the web, along with new gamemodes, fan-made expansions for Unreal, new character models, weapons, and mutators.

Ah, mutators.

Mutators can be thought of as ‘mini-mods,’ if you want. There's a list of them you can select before each game that all change, or mutate (see?), the gameplay a bit. Superjump, low gravity, replacing each weapon spawn on a map with another, big head mode, stuff like that. Mutators are a fun addition that can mix up a usual match, but don't bring with them the sweeping changes of a full mod or total conversion. They were a way to illustrate how flexible the development options were, and a nifty thing for players to have available to them.

So, Unreal Tournament had lots of ways to keep the game fresh, either built-in or crafted by other players. Turn a small map into Explosion Hell with the Rocket Arena mutator, or download a player-made weapon pack filled with weird goodies. Wondering how Quake’s iconic maps play in UT? Somebody's made them. Hell, someone's even made a bunch of UT2004 maps for UT99, complete with de-made character and weapon models. A lasting legacy of creativity is what UT99 brought above all else, and the fact that so much of what it did can remain as the primary example of how to do something right says more than I can about its impact on videogames as a whole.

Unreal Tournament is a fast, brutal game balancing all of its various systems on the edge of a spinning razor blade, and it does so with a mastery that I feel was not seen among its peers of the time. From the weapons, the movement, the maps, and the gamemodes, Unreal Tournament presents you the player with so many options, but it never feels like a generic crowd-pleasing paste has been slathered over everything. The game's core is simple and well defined, and everything else builds on that. It has a certain tightly-realized identity that I feel is missing from a lot of games that try to have the same sort of arcady arena vibe - Halo was probably its closest rival as far as small genre shifts go, and looking at Destiny 2 as the latest version of that is a weird mix of procedurally generated weapons, hero abilities, flat maps, and very few projectile weapons. Skill has been taken out of some areas and added to others, but the design feels looser, less actualized. Call of Duty is fast, but still has that small desire to be somewhat tactical, so there are recoil patterns and weapon attachments, the rich-get-richer killstreaks, and a progression system that murders any attempt at balancing their arsenal. Quake Live, from what I understand, has a healthy enough playerbase, but my preference has already been stated. Quake Champions tries to marry its classic gameplay with that of Overwatch, and the reactions have been mixed. Team Fortress 2 has been bogged down with more and more weapons that blur the lines between classes, and the official map rotation - already small on launch - has barely been added to in twelve years.

This isn't a “games are different now and that's bad” sort of thing, my point is just that UT99 had a much cleaner mission statement, if you will, than what we get now. The industry's gotten bigger, and budgets followed. Expectations of sales rose, leading developers to want to bring in as many players as they could. Games can't really be niche anymore.

Or maybe that was true five years ago, but now the indie scene’s getting huge, and you can find a revival of your favorite genre just about anywhere. Most aren't super well polished, but isn't that what made games like Unreal, Quake, and Half-Life into what we remember? They all had more ambition than was perhaps warranted, and each made their huge impacts despite a healthy amount of blemishes. Endless polish makes for a good player experience, but maybe not as much of a memorable one.

Unreal Tournament all but made me into an FPS fan, and I think it's great that we all have so many types to choose from now. Public tastes have shifted and evolutions of the genre happened. I've enjoyed my fair share of Calls of Duty and Battlefields, I plugged hundreds of hours into TF2 throughout highschool, I've ridden the Overwatch hype train, and I love poking holes in walls and getting sneaky kills in Rainbow Six: Siege. But Unreal Tournament is my oldest bastion, and one I return to every now and then when the whim takes me. It occupies my top slot, though admittedly in an endless 1v1 with Unreal Tournament 2004.

But there was another Unreal Tournament between the two, one that came and went with mild fanfare while paving the way for what I feel is, hands down, the best game ever crafted by human hands. Check back at the end of the month for a short look at the odd little Unreal Tournament 2003.

#unreal tournament #ut99 #words about games #videogame #review #essay #fortnite #unreal retrospective

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lechevaliermalfet · 6 years

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Pistols at Dawn: A Look at Doom and Marathon

In the mid-1990s, the first-person shooter genre was born with Doom. It wasn't the first game of its type. Games like Wolfenstein 3D and Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold preceded it. Catacomb 3D came before either of those. And you can trace the lineage further back if you like. But it was Doom that saw the kind of runaway success most development studios live and die without ever attaining. That success spawned imitators. It was the imitators and their imitations – some of them using the very same engine – that made it a genre. It's how genres are born.

It was interesting to watch that happen in real time.

But that's the PC side of history.

If you were a Macintosh user, you were probably sick to death of your PC-owning friends crowing about Doom, all the more because it wasn't available for your system of choice. Doom would eventually make its way Mac-ward... after its own sequel was eventually released for the system first. Absurd as this sounds, it didn’t really matter too much. Story, and the importance of continuity between games, wasn't exactly a big concern in Doom.

But Mac users had little reason to despair. Because although Doom was and is rightly remembered as a classic, Mac users were privy to a game nearly as good – probably even equal, maybe even better, depending on who you talk to.

That game was Marathon.

More below the cut.

It's hard trying to justify comparisons between Doom and Marathon, because despite their similarities, they aren't really in the same league. It's hard to compare any game that became the jumping-off point for a whole genre to its contemporaries. But as much as I lionize Doom, and as much as everyone else does the same, it's perhaps helpful to think that this is done with the benefit of hindsight. Today, in 2018, we've had nearly two-and-a-half decades of Doom being available for almost every single thing that could conceivably run it.

Remembering Doom in its time, it would have been hard to predict that it would go on to achieve quite the level of adulation it's garnered over the years. It's not that Doom doesn't deserve it. It's more that any game attaining this level of success both in its time and in the long term is basically impossible to predict. Doom was much talked about, it was wildly popular, you heard rumors of whole IT departments losing days of productivity to it in network games, but... Well, it was just one game. Later two. It was perfectly valid to suppose, in the mid-90s, that some developer would surely supplant it with something even better. That's just the way things worked. It's just that Doom was well-made enough, well-balanced enough, that "something even better" didn't come around for a long time.

Still, the Macintosh is not where I would have expected to look for real competition for Doom.

The Mac wasn't actually a barren wasteland, game-wise. It's just easy to remember it that way, especially if, like me, you grew up playing PC games. Most of the games we think of as being influential in the realm of computer gaming tended not to come from that direction. Mac users made up a smaller portion of overall computer users at that point. PCs (still often referred to as "IBM/PC compatibles" at the time) being the larger market and thus a source of larger potential profits, that was where the majority of developers focused their attention. The hassles of porting a game to Mac, whether handled by the original developer or farmed out to somebody else, were frequently judged not to be worth the potential profit. At times, it was determined not to be profitable in the first place.

There were a few games – Myst comes immediately to mind – that bucked this trend, but most Mac games only became influential once they crossed over to PCs, like... Well, like Myst did. The Mac ecosystem just wasn't big enough for anything that happened in it exclusively to influence the wider world of PC gaming.

Actually, let's go with that ecosystem analogy for a minute.

Mac gaming in the early 90s was sort of like Australia. It's a tiny system that only accounted for a small percentage of the biosphere. It had its own unique creatures, similar to animals occupying equivalent ecological niches elsewhere in the world. But on closer inspection, these turned out to all be very different from their counterparts, often in fundamental ways. And then you had some creatures with no real equivalents elsewhere. There was a lot of parallel evolution.

Case in point: Marathon.

Being released a scant eleven days after Doom, you definitely can't accuse it of being one of the imitators. It didn't happen in a vacuum, though.

Its creators, Bungie, were a sort of oddball company whose founders openly admitted that they started off in the Macintosh market not because of any fervent belief in the superiority of the platform, but because it was far less competitive than the PC market at the time.

They started off with Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete, a multiplayer-only (more or less) first-person maze game, and followed it up with Pathways Into Darkness.

Pathways was meant to be a sequel to Minotaur at first, until it morphed into its own thing over the course of its development. In genre terms, it's most like a first-person shooter. Except there are heavy adventure game elements, nonlinearity, and multiple endings depending on decisions you make during the game, which are pretty foreign to the genre. It also features a level of resource scarcity that wouldn't be at all out of place in a survival horror game.

Incidentally, I would love to see a source port of Pathways Into Darkness. It is its own weird, awkward beast of a game, and I would dearly love to be able to play it, after having seen only maybe ten minutes of gameplay at a friend's house one time when I was about twelve.

They followed this up with the original Marathon.

Doom is largely iterative. It follows on from a tradition of older FPS games made by its developer, like Wolfenstein 3D and Catacombs 3D. Like those predecessors, it relegates the little apparent story to pre-game and post-game text, and features a very video game-y structure that relies on discrete levels and fast, reflex-oriented play. It adds complexity and sophistication to these elements as seen in previous games, introducing more enemies, more weapons, and more complex and varied environments, then layers all of this on top of an already proven, solid gameplay core.

Marathon, by contrast, simplified and distilled the elements of previous games by its developer. It opts to be more clearly an FPS (as we understand it in modern terms) than any of its predecessors, shedding Pathways' adventure elements and non-linearity while increasing the player's arsenal. However, it's still less straightforward than Doom's pure level-by-level structure. Marathon presents itself as a series of objectives given to the player character (the Security Officer) by various other characters to be achieved within the level. These can range from scouting out particular areas, to ferrying items around the level, to clearing out enemies, to rescuing friendly characters, and so on.

Marathon's story, unlike Doom's, is front and center. Where Doom leaves the player to satisfy themselves that they are slowly progressing toward some ultimate enemy with every stage, Marathon gives the player concrete goals each step of the way, framing each objective as either a way to gain advantage over the enemy, or to recover from setbacks inflicted by them. Doom's story is focused on the player character and their direct actions. For narrative purposes, anything happening beyond your ability to observe is irrelevant. Marathon instead opts to give the player a feeling that although they are the one making crucial things happen in the story, they are not directing the action themselves.

Which brings me to something interesting about Marathon's story.

The player character, the Security Officer, has surprisingly little agency within the narrative. At a guess, I'd say that's because it would be almost impossible to express his own thoughts and emotions with the way the plot is relayed. It's true that most games -- especially in the FPS genre -- tell you what to do. Rescue the princess. Save the world. Prevent nuclear catastrophe. Etc. Etc. But this is normally done in an abstract sense, by presenting you a clear goal and some means to achieve it. Even open-world games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim have an overarching goal that you're meant to be slowly working your way toward.

But while your actions in a given game are generally understood to be working toward the stated goal, the player is usually presented in the narrative as having a choice – or perhaps more accurately as having chosen prior to the beginning of the game proper – regarding whatever path the game puts them on. Mario has chosen to go save Princess Toadstool. Link has chosen to go find the pieces of the Triforce and save Princess Zelda. Sonic has chosen to confront Doctor Robotnik. Even the Doom Guy has chosen to fight the demons infesting the moons of Mars on his own rather than saying "fuck it" and running. The reasons for these choices may in some cases be left up to the player to sort out or to apply their imagination, but the point remains. These characters have chosen their destinies.

The Security Officer from the Marathon trilogy, by contrast, does not. Throughout the games, he is presented as following orders. "Install these three circuits in such-and-such locations". "Scout out this area". "Clear the hostile aliens out of this section of the ship". And so on, and so forth. Even in the backstory, found in the manual, the character is just doing his job, responding to a distress call before he fully realizes the sheer scale of the problem. The player, as the Security Officer, is always moving from one objective to the next on the orders of different AI constructs who happen to be in control of him – more or less – at a given time. The Security Officer is clearly a participant in events, but he lacks true agency.

In fairness, it must have been hard to figure out how to tell a compelling story within the context of a first-person shooter back in the early 90s, which is why so few people did it.

I'm not enough of a programmer to be able to explain it well (understatement; I'm not any kind of programmer), but the basic gist of it is that games like Doom weren't technically in 3D. The environments were rendered in such a way that they appeared in three dimensions from the player's perspective, but as earlier versions of source ports like ZDoom made clear, this was an illusion, one that was shattered the moment you enabled mouse aiming and observed the environments from any angle other than dead-ahead. The enemies, meanwhile, were 2D sprites, which was common in video games of any type for the day.

This was how Marathon was set up as well. It's how basically every first-person shooter worked until the release of Quake – and some after it.

The problem is that this doesn't lend itself very well to more cinematic storytelling. Sprites tended not to be very expressive given the lower resolutions of the day. At least, not sprites drawn to relatively realistic proportions like the ones in Doom and Marathon. So you couldn't really do cinematic storytelling sequences with them, and that left only a handful of other options for getting your story across.

You could do what I tend to think of as Dynamic Stills, a la Ninja Gaiden on the NES. At its best, it enables comic book-style storytelling, but that's about as far as it goes.

You can do FMV cutscenes, which at the time basically involved bad actors in cheap costumes filmed against green screens or really low-budget sets. CG was relatively uncommon (and likely prohibitivesly expensive) even in the mid-90s.

You can do mostly text, interspersed throughout your game.

You can just not have much story at all.

Doom opted for option four. John Carmack has been quoted as saying that story in video games is like story in porn. Everybody expects it to be there, but nobody really cares about it.

I disagree with this sentiment pretty vehemently, as it happens. There are some games that aren't well served by a large amount of plot, and Doom is definitely one of them. But to state that this is or should be true for the medium as a whole is frankly ridiculous.

There's something refreshing, almost freeing, about a game that has less a story than a premise. Doom starts off on Phobos, one of the moons of Mars, which has been invaded by demons from hell. They've gained access by virtue of human scientists' experimentation with teleportation technology gone horribly, horribly wrong. The second episode sees you teleported to Deimos, which as been entirely swallowed up by Hell, and which segues from the purely technological/military environments of Doom to more supernatural environs. Episode 3 has you assaulting Hell proper. Doom II's subtitle, Hell on Earth, tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the setting and premise of the game.

That's it. There are no characters to develop or worry about. It's just you as the lone surviving marine, your improbably large arsenal, and all the demons Hell can throw at you. Go nuts.

Bungie, meanwhile, took a different approach. I can't seem to find out which of their founders said it, but they have been on record as basically being diametrically opposed to Id Software in their attitude about story. "The purpose of games is to tell stories." I wish I knew who at Bungie said that.

Marathon is very much a story-oriented game. Of the aforementioned methods of storytelling, they opted for option three: text, and lots of it.

Marathon's story is complex and labyrinthine, especially as it continues through the sequels (Marathon 2: Durandal and Marathon Infinity), and is open to interpretation at various points. Much is left for the player to piece together themselves. Aside from the player character, the story mainly centers on the actions of three AI constructs: Leela (briefly), Durandal, and Tycho. Their actions, in the face of an invasion by a race of alien slavers called the Pfohr, drive the story.

Their words and actions are relayed to the player by way of text at terminals scattered throughout the game's environments. Some of these take the form of orders and objectives given by the AI to the player character, the Security Officer. Some of these are more musings or rants (two out of the three AIs you work for over the course of the Marathon trilogy are not exactly all there), which serve to flesh out events happening beyond the player's observations, and help build the world. Some of these are seemingly random bits of background information, presented as if they were being accessed by someone else (often an enemy) before they were distracted by something – usually you, shooting everything in sight.

Design-wise, there are some interesting differences.

Doom is old-school from a time when that was the only school, with levels that strike a nice balance between video game-y and still giving at least a vague sense that they were built to be something other than deathtrap mazes. But what makes them old-school, at this point, is the fact that they're levels, with discrete starting and ending points, where your goal is to move from the former to the latter and hit the button or throw the lever to end it and begin the next one.

There's no plot to lose the thread of, no series of objectives for you to lose track of if you put the game down for a week, or a month, or longer still. It's extremely pick-up-and-play, equally well suited to killing twenty minutes or a whole afternoon, as you like.

The appeal (aesthetics aside) of Doom is also at least in part its accessibility. It has a decently high skill ceiling (which is to say, the level of skill required to play at an expert level), but a surprisingly low skill floor (the level of skill required to play with basic proficiency), which has lent it a certain evergreen quality. And Id Software has been keen to capitalize on this. Doom is one of a small number of PC games (Diablo II is the only other one I can think of off the top of my head; what is it with games that have you fighting demons from Hell?) that have been commercially viable and available basically from the day they were released. In addition to DOS on PCs, Doom was rejiggered for Windows 95, and also (eventually) saw release for Mac. Also, it's been sold for multiple consoles: the Super NES, the Sega 32X (regrettably), the Atari Jaguar (also regrettably), the PlayStation, the N64, the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3, and the Xbox One (the 360 version again, via backward compatibility). And source ports have kept the PC version alive and kicking, adding now-standard features like mouse aiming, particle effects, and support for widescreen displays.

The result is a game that, if you don't mind pixelated graphics, is as ferociously playable today as it was twenty-four years ago (as of this writing), and has enjoyed a kind of longevity usually not seen outside the realm of first-party Nintendo classics.

Marathon by contrast is somewhat less inviting.

From a technical standpoint, Marathon is more or less the equal of Doom. The environments throughout the series are rendered at a somewhat higher resolution, but the enemies are less well animated. Marathon also introduced the idea of mouse aiming to the FPS genre, and allowed the player to use that to look (and aim) vertically, which hadn't been done before either. Even Doom, though it also introduced more vertical gameplay, locked the player's movement to the strictly horizontal; vertical aiming was accounted for automatically, although source ports have modernized this. Marathon leans into its verticality a little more as a result, and level layouts are more complex, bordering on the impossiblely convoluted without the aid of your automap.

While I wouldn't go so far as to say that Marathon would classify as a survival horror game, there are some elements of that genre in it. This is almost certainly unintentional, and I'm identifying them as such retroactively (the genre hadn’t really arrived yet). Still, they exist. Ammunition is more scarce than in Doom, forcing the player to lean on the lower end of their arsenal far later into the game than Doom does. Some weapons also feature alternate fire modes, which was a genre first.

Health packs are nonexistent; instead, the player can recharge their health at terminals designed for this purpose, usually placed very sparingly. Saving is also handled at dedicated terminals – a decision better befitting a console game, and somewhat curious here. In addition to health, there is also an air gauge, which depletes gradually whenever the player is in vacuum or underwater, and which can be difficult to find refills for.

Marathon also marks the early appearance of weapon magazines in the first-person shooter genre. Doom held to the old design established by Wolfenstein and older games that the player fires their weapons straight from the ammo reserves. If you have a hundred shotgun rounds, then you can fire a hundred times, no reload necessary. The reloading mechanic as we would most readily recognize it seems to have been added for the genre with Half-Life, for reasons of greater realism and introducing tension to the game.

Marathon's version of this, as you might expect for a pioneering effort, is pretty rough. There is no way to manually reload your weapons when you want. Rather, the game will automatically cycle through the reload animation once you empty the magazine. It does helpfully display how many rounds remain in the magazine at all times so you know how many you have left before a reload, and can plan accordingly. But it still exerts the familiar reload pressure, just in a different way. Rather than asking yourself whether you have the spare seconds for a reload to top off your magazine, now you have to ask yourself whether it's wiser to just fire the last few rounds of the magazine to trigger the reload now, when it's safe, so that you have a full magazine ready to go for the next encounter. Marathon's tendency to leave you feeling a little more ammo-starved than Doom makes this decision an agonizing one at times.

Id's game is pretty sparing with the way it doles out rockets and energy cells for the most high-powered weapons, true. But the real workhorse weapons, the shotgun and the chaingun, have ammo lying around in plenty. Past a certain early point in any given episode of Doom or Doom II, as long as you diligently grab whatever ammo you come across and your aim is even halfway decent, you never have to worry about running out. Marathon, by contrast, sees you relying on your pistol for a good long while. Compared to other weapons you find, it has a good balance of accuracy and availability of ammunition.

The overall pacing and difficulty of both games is also somewhat different.

Both games are hard, but in different ways. Doom has enemies scattered throughout a level in ones and twos, but most of the major encounters feature combinations and larger numbers. But the plentiful ammo drops and health packs mean the danger of these encounters tends to be relatively isolated, and encourages fast maneuvering and some risk-taking. If you can make it through a given encounter, you usually have the opportunity to heal up and re-arm before the next one. Doom is centered around its action. It gives you the shotgun – which you’ll be using for most of the game, thanks to its power – as early as the first level if you’re on the lookout for secrets, and by the second level, you really can’t miss it.

Marathon, by contrast, paces itself (and the player) differently. Ammo gets doled out more sparingly, and health recharge stations are likewise placed few and far between (rarely more than one or two in a stage, at least so far as I’ve played, and small enough that they can be easily overlooked). Save points are likewise not always conveniently placed, and the fact that the game has save points means that you can’t savescum, and dying can result in a fair amount of lost progress. The result is that, unless you’re closer to the skill ceiling, you tend to play more carefully and conservatively. You learn to kite enemies, stringing them along to let you take on as few at a time as possible.

The tactics I developed to play games like Doom and later Quake didn’t always serve me very well when I first started playing Marathon. The main danger in Bungie’s game is the death of a thousand cuts. Where Doom attempts in most cases to destroy you in a single fell swoop, Marathon seeks to wear you down bit by bit until you have nothing left, and you’re jumping at shadows, knowing that the next blow to fall may be your last. It encourages more long-term thinking. Similar to a survival horror game, every clip spent and every hit taken has meaning, and can alter your approach to the scenario you find yoruself in.

In short, if Doom is paced like a series of sprints, Marathon is, well... a marathon.

Another interesting difference is how both games deal with their inherent violence.

As games which feature future military men mowing down whole legions of enemies by the time the credits roll, violence is a matter of course. It becomes casual. But both games confront it in different ways.

Doom was one of the games that helped stir up a moral panic in the U.S. in the early to mid-90s (alongside Mortal Kombat, most notably). While I don't agree with it, it was hardly surprising. Doom gloried in its violence. Every enemy went down covered in blood (some of them came at you that way), some of them straight-up liquefying if caught too near an explosion. This is to say nothing of all the hearts on altars or dead marines littering the landscape to provide the proper ambiance.

The idea was simple: You were surrounded by violent monsters, and the only way to overcome them was to become equally violent. The game's fast pace and adrenaline-rushing gameplay only served to emphasize this. Doom isn't a stupid game by any means – it requires a certain amount of cleverness and a good sense of direction in addition to good reflexes and decent aim to safely navigate its levels -- but the primary direction it makes you think in is how? How do I get through this barrier, how do I best navigate through these dark halls, how do I approach this room full of enemies that haven't seen me yet?

Marathon asks those questions as well, because any decent game is constantly asking you those questions, because they are all variations on the same basic question any game of any kind (video games, board games, whatever) is asking you: How do you overcome the challenges the game throws at you using the tools and abilities the game gives you?

The difference (well, the narrative difference, distinct from all the rest) is that Marathon also talks about the violence seemingly inherent in human nature as one of a variety of things in its narrative.

To be fair, Marathon brings it up pretty briefly in its terminal text. But one of the terminals highlights Durandal's musings on the Security Officer, and humankind in general.

Organic beings are constantly fighting for life. Every breath, every motion brings you one instant closer to your death. With that kind of heritage and destiny, how can you deny yourself? How can you expect yourself to give up violence?

Indeed, it may be seen as not just useful, but a necessary and essential component of humanity. Certainly it's vital to the Security Officer's survival and ultimate victory in the story of the games.

And yet, on the whole, Marathon is a less violent game. Or at least, it glories in its violence less. Enemies still go down in a welter of their own blood, because that happens when you shoot a living creature full of bullet holes. But it's less gory on the whole – bloody like a military movie, bloody as a matter of fact, in contrast to Doom's cartoonishly overwrought slasher-flick excess.

And yet it's Marathon that feels compelled to grapple with its violence, to ask what motivates it, not just in the moment, but wherever it appears in the nature and history of humankind.

On the whole, I think I come down on the side of Marathon, personally. Its themes, its aesthetic, and its characters are more to my liking. True, part of this is simply because Marathon has characters. Doom has the player character and a horde of enemies. Even the final boss of each installment has no narrative impact to speak of. They simply appear in order to be shot down. They're presented as the forces behind the demonic invasion, but aside from being bigger and stronger than all the other demons you face, there's no real sense of presence, narratively. And that's fine. But on the balance, I tend to prefer story in my games, and Marathon delivers, even as it's sometimes a bit janky, even as I get the feeling that Bungie's reach exceeded their grasp with it.

I can recognize Doom as the game that's more accessible, and probably put together a little better, and of course infinitely more recognizable. Id still sells it, and generally speaking, it's worth the five whole dollars (ten if you want Doom II as well) it'll cost you on PSN, or Xbox Live, or Steam.

Bungie, meanwhile, gave the Marathon trilogy away for free in the early 2000s. It's how I finally managed to play it, despite never owning a Mac. There are source ports that allow it to be played on PCs (or Linux, even). About the only new development in the franchise was an HD remaster of Marathon 2: Durandal for the Xbox 360. In the same vein as the remasters for Halo or Halo 2, this version changes nothing about the original except to update the graphics and adapt the control scheme for a 360 controller.

I'd love to see a remake of Marathon with modern technology, even though I know it's extraordinarily unlikely to happen. Bungie's occupied with Destiny for the foreseeable future. The most we've gotten in ages is a few Easter eggs. 343 Guilty Spark in the original Halo featured Durandal's symbol prominently on his mechanical eye, which fueled speculation for a little while that perhaps Halo took place in the same continuity. There's another Easter egg in Destiny 2 that suggests two of its weapons, the MIDA Multi-tool and the MIDA Mini-tool, fell out of an alternate universe where Marathon's events occurred instead of Destiny's. But that's been it.

The tragedy of Marathon is that it wasn't in a position for its innovations to be felt industry-wide.

Doom had the better overall playability and greater accessibility. If you were to ask where a lot of FPS genre innovations came from, the average gamer would probably not point to Marathon as the progenitor of those things. Quake would probably get credit for adding mouse aiming (even though it wasn't a standard menu option, and had to be enabled with a console command), or else maybe Duke Nukem 3D. Unreal would most likely get credited as the genesis of alternate firing modes, while Half-Life is probably the one most people remember for introducing the notion of reloading weapons. I'm not totally sure which other FPS would get the nod for mainstreaming the greater presence of story in the genre – probably Half-Life again.

But since it's free, I would strongly recommend giving the Marathon trilogy a spin. It's a little rough around the edges even judged by the standards of its time, but still eminently playable, with a strong story told well. And if it seems at times like the FPS That History Forgot, well, that's because History was mostly looking the other way at the time. It's part of the appeal for me, too. It feels at times like a "lost" game.

Let that add to its mystique.

#doom #marathon #retro games #retro gaming #first person shooter #fps #id softward #bungie

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mrrobotdecodesthematrix · 2 years

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Web3.0 and the Future

In 1995, Clifford Stoll, a technology columnist and author for Newsweek claimed that that the internet will never work because “hardware and software will all top out in the mid-90s and, thus, the Internet will never ever get any more user friendly or portable. Also, it is different and scary.” This turned out to be a controversy since his prediction about the future of internet turned out be a massive failure.

By the year 2022, we have witnessed a massive transformation of the digital space where internet played a major role in the development of most of the existing and upcoming technologies. From the first generation, Web 1.0 where we upgraded to IPv6, we saw the rise of the World Wide Web and the first ever introduction of web browsers. Many tech giants of the era got into a war with each other to rule over the cyberspace with the most controversial being Microsoft and Netscape. Towards the early and mid 2000s we witnessed the era of Web 2.0 which prevails till today. This era was game changing since we saw the rise of 2G,3G and 4G which changed the entire history of technological communication and information sharing among the masses. We witnessed the massive shift from feature phones to smartphones which provided accessibility to any and all of the information of the world in the palm of humans, literally. Many of the early tech nerds gave birth to the world we live in right now and turned their ideas into massive successful businesses. The cyber space was metaphorically the gold mine which they dug into. The age of Web 2.0 is witnessing another upgrade very soon, the Web 3.0, where the internet will be completely decentralized and server-less. With an increasing popularity and applications of Blockchain and Crypto, we are sure they will be the next game changing players. Metaverse is also seeing a rapid advancement in the upcoming years which steady improvements in Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. The way of communication in Metaverse through Web 3.0 will completely transform the history of human interaction where we may be witnessing organic computers. Though we have seen remote communication but a decentralized network coupled with AR and VR will transform the user experience completely with almost negligible no physical interactions. For example, the missile and artillery used today are still in fact controlled manually, but with Web 3.0 we might witness the artillery targeting and launching on their own. This is where ML and AI comes into the play, which is also seeing a rapid and massive development. Bionic microchips, smart cities, completely automated machinery etcetera and what not, Web 3.0 will even improvised the existing IOT to completely digitalize the human civilization. As they say, Data is the oil in today’s society, which is true. This is where cloud comes onto the stage. Almost all of the major tech giants have already migrated to the cloud and revolutionized their business models. But cyber breach still remains a major cause of concern, we may notice some of the biggest war fares in the future if the security of cyberspace is not taken care of in Web 3.0 and the recovery from it might not be plausibly possible. With that being said, lets move on to the future of work culture. We are already witnessing remote and hybrid work model in the past 2 years which was only accelerated due to the pandemic. Though the pandemic had to be a massive tragedy of the 21st century, but it have a major boost to the tech businesses which would not have happened otherwise. With the rise in cloud and AI, we are witnessing a lot of platforms where the common mass can create its own applications with having almost no prior coding experience with the use of existing functionalities. This in the future of internet may lead to a rise in citizen developers where apps would be made on low code or no code platforms. To talk about the future of internet, a short article might not suffice. The future holds an infinite number of possibilities and opportunities, but with every technological advancement comes a unpredictable malware, which we as a civilization must take care of.

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codetrusoftwaredeveloper · 2 years

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TOP TECH TRENDS TO SHAPE YOUR CAREER IN 2022

2022 Top technologies to shape your career

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning

Artificial Intelligence (AI) , although started gaining popularity a decade ago, still continues to be one of the new technologies today because its remarkable effects on how we live, work, and play are still in the early stages. AI is already popular for its use in applications for image and speech recognition, navigation programs, smartphone personal assistants, voice assistants, and much more.

A B2B research firm “Markets and Markets” suggested that the AI market is expected to grow to a $190 billion industry by 2025. So, with AI spreading its wings across sectors, new jobs will be created in development, programming, testing, support, and maintenance. Even the salaries provided for these jobs will be quite high, thus, AI technology is the trend to watch out for.

Robotic Process Automation

Just like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is another trending technology that is automating jobs. RPA in general is the use of multiple software and applications used for automating business processes such as data collection and analysis, customer service, and other repetitive tasks, which were managed previously through manual processes.

RPA is a rapidly advancing technology that generates many jobs across different industries. It offers several new career options and trajectories such as a programmer, project manager, business analyst, or consultant.

Edge Computing Cloud computing previously was a new technology trend to watch, however, with major players like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform dominating the market, Cloud computing has become mainstream.

Although organizations are adopting Cloud solutions today, they have found several limitations in this technology. And thus, it is not an emerging technology trend. Edge is.

Edge computing is designed to help bypass the latency that Cloud Computing causes and helps organizations to get data into a data center for processing.

Click for more information "2022 Information Technologies" -https://codetru.com/TechTrends

#ArtificialIntelligence #MachineLearning #RoboticProcessAutomation #QuantumComputing #EdgeComputing #VirtualReality #AugmentedReality #BlockChain #IOT #internetofThings #cyberSecurity #5gTech #uxdesigner #bestwebsitedesigner #technology #uidesigner

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blinkragen-blog · 6 years

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Interview with developer of Lobotomy corporation

1.Hello, i'm the Blinkraven, from russian translation team (Tales&Stories Team) , you can call me Blink or Roman. What is your name and what your role one Project moon company?

Hello, I am Kim Ji-hoon, who is the director of ProjectMoon.

2.Can you tell a bit about the company? How did you all gathered and found the company? What is your main goal in foundation Project moon game studio?

At first, I gathered friends from university game production clubs and formed a team. I started with four people, but I felt the shortage of art and programming through the project (LobotomyCorp). So I took part in university events, festivals, and various other places to gather other members. Lobotomy Corporation was finally developed with 10 people.

I always want to make a work with the theme of "human hymn(人間讚歌)". As the light shines most strongly in the darkness, I think that human beings shine in despair. The goal of the ProjectMoon is to make the content of the subculture series continuously. I want to try various contents such as comics, novels, animations as well as games one day.

3.What inspired you to create Lobotomy corp. ? Did you already have experience in making games on Unity or is it your debut?

Lobotomy Corporation was inspired by SCP Foundation, Cabin in the woods, Warehouse13, and many other institutions that deal with monsters and supernatural tools. Originally, When I saw the works mentioned above, I wanted to play a game of monster management, however, there isn't the game like that so I made it.

There have been many attempts to make games, but Lobotomy Corporation is the first finished game.

4.What do you think is the main key feature of the game? What should the game reveal with it stoyline and gameplay?

I think managing monsters and suppressing them are the most important features of game play. In the story, we paid attention to the wounds that each character had and the process of accepting them.

5.As we know, as basis for the plot of storyline contents were taken many elements of relegions and mythologies and others. Why Kaballah in the first place?

As mentioned earlier, it was clearest to convey the theme of human hymn through Kabbalah. I wanted to show through Kabbalah that a human being follows the path to becoming fully self. Likewise, we wanted to show the limits of seeing the world only through the perspective of Kabbalah.

6.Contrary to the established stereotype that almost all Korean games are focused on the grind component, there is also a thoughtful game world in your game, details of which are revealed when communicating with the sephiras, who are responsible for departaments. The question is: how often did the storyline changes during development? How much cardinally? I still remember those days of Beta-version, when Angela was an old AI-computer that uses perforated tape.

From the very beginning to the beta version, and until now, the topic of the story has not changed. However, 'Sephira' characters were added in the process of storytelling. When I wanted to communicate the story, I felt the limitations of the dialogue between the player and Angela. So I decided to make many changes in the summer of 2017.

7.Where did the ideas for the abnormalities come from? Did many of them personify human sins, is it really so?

It is hard to say that Abnormalities come from a variety of materials and are specific to one thing. Memes, original sin, urban legend, fairy tales, legends, and social phenomena. However, they have a common interpretation to match the story of the game.

8.The game has a hidden mechanics, forcing the player to "accidentally" re-play the game again and again, to uncover all the story plot twists, to study all the abnormalities. How much in your opinion the game is replayable?

If the players have seen all of the stories and unlocked Abnormalities' information, I think they really enjoyed all the content of the game. And I was intending to make the player try multiple retries in this process. Because the company turned into a mess through the Abnormalities and watching the situation was also intended to be a fun factor, I wanted to make the watching the situation in the retry of the game was also worth.

9.Approximately in July 2017, you decidet to radically change both the UI and gameplay in general. What was the reason for this? What did not suit in so-called [Legacy]-version of the game? Although the storyline also moved from "dead end", sephiras (visually they weve very interesting), the entire visual part of the game changed at all. And then closer to november, you changed again the visual part, making the game to look like as it is now. Was it hard to make that decisions?

The biggest reason for the change was 'it was not fun and it did not fit the intention'. This was a difficult decision for us, but the decision we had to do at the same time. I thought the pre-change game was just mimicking the western art style and indie game style. I thought I have to change the game style to what I can best create and the style that I like, in order to make a game that is sustainable in the future. So I decided to change everything. The process of changing was very painful, but after the change everything became clear how to build and develop the story.

10.Oh, and earlier in [Legacy]-version of the game, for normally walkthrough it was required to monitor a lot of parameters and key features, but during development, some functions were removed, some - simplified. Was this done because of fan complaints, or did you find these systems reduntant and uncomfortable for the game?

The values, genders and final observations of the Abnormality that were in the "legacy version" have been removed. Employee values and gender were changed to construct gameplay more clearly. The final observation of the Abnormality is something that has been removed due to the difficulties of realistic development. It was difficult to develop the final observation while adding various stories and scripts of Sephira through the changes, due to time and financial problems. I am sorry for this part too.

11.As I remember, earlier you had financial problems during game development. How did you manage to raise money for development? Did you have to lose something, or try to economize on something for the sake of further development?

We have not overcome financial problems using special methods. Thanks to the translation teams in Russia, China and Japan, we were able to make more sales in different countries, and as a result, we only got enough money to keep the team for a while. And now, after the development of LobotomyCorproation, only 4 team members are staying and developing. Other team members are seeking another job or going back to school. Although the size and speed of development can be reduced, I think we can keep the team longer.

12.Have you thought at the stage of development - of choosing a platform to make the game cross-platform of just PC-exclusive? For now it's very popular to make games on mobile devices, and your game with small edits of the interface could go well on mobile devices.

I focused on PC from the beginning. And Lobotomy Corporation is not going to switch to other platforms. Because the UX of the game is focused solely on PC, I thought that there would be a lot of changes if we were going to change to another platform. But the following work will consider expanding to other platforms, including PCs.

13.From the point of view of the Korean game developer, is there a great competition among your collegues in the game development industry of indie gaming? How populat are indie-games in Korea, that oriented on single player play?

There are also many indie game developers in Korea. Most of them are mobile-based indie games. So I did not see any other team in terms of competition. Compared to the indie game sector, Korea has a small sector of single-player games.

14.How, from the professional point of view, do you think that the opinion that in Korea games play only in online games is not exaggerated?

Korea is focused on mobile games and online games. But I do not think this is unconditionally bad. Because there are a lot of players in the world such as a person who loves a single game, a person who likes online games, and a person who likes mobile games. So I think it has its own meaning.

15.Has the game paid off since getting into Early access on Steam, and until now? What was your mood when you learned that the game was so popular in the world (well, and in particular in Russia)?

As a creator, there will be no greater joy. It is hard to find the driving force that makes our work world fun in many countries and expects what will happen. I want to create interesting stories and games that only we can show in the future!

Let's talk about future plans:

1.Since the release of version 1.0 (and the came out from Early Access), many players have already been able to find all the storyline endings that are hidden in the game. What do you expect the expected percentages of finding endings to be?

I think 80% of the players who have cleared up to Day50 have seen a hidden ending. If the player went to Day 50, wouldn't they want to fill in 100% of the encyclopedia?

2.In the so-called "true ending" or 100% of the Seed of light, Angela takes the complex under her control and came out from the facility to the surface for herself. Do you already have storyline sheets for the sequel and will somehow "bad" endings influence or somehow be mentioned in the sequel?

Yes. The ending of Lobotomy Corporation has had a big impact on the world, and the results will be shown in the sequel.

3.By your calculations, how much time will it take to develop a sequel, so that at least the first pl15.Has the game paid off since getting into Early access on Steam, and until now? What was your mood when you learned that the game was so popular in the world (well, and in particular in Russia)?

The development period is one year and six months until early release. We plan to spend about six months in the Eary Access period. But it always didn't go as planned. ;) I do not know if we will release the demo version, but I think I could show the gameplay within a year.

4.As for now are popular tactical turn-based games in various variations, whether it will affect the sequel or its gameplay will be like the first part - in real time with an active pause?

I'm not going to make a turn-based game as much as possible. I want to create a game that is played in as real-time as possible.

5.As I know, you monitor the appearance of content on your game on the Internet. Do you know about different memes, video parodies, etc.? What do you think about it?

Yes. We monitor videos, pictures, streaming, etc. uploaded by various fans. We are gaining great strength through the watching of enjoying the gameplay and delicate creation. In addition, problems with bugs and balances are also monitored through monitoring the world community.

6.Well, finally, your opinion about indie-game industry as a whole? What is the future of indie-games in game-development?

I think indie games are something that is unique and interesting. There are so many indie games coming out every day. What I think will become more important in the future is the unique universe of the work itself. Each game, even if it is individually, can survive in a number of indie games if it happens in a gigantic connected world. But most importantly, it has to be an attractive world, and the game must be fun.

#interview #lobotomy corp #eng

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buddyvibezbff · 1 year

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Understanding the basics of Artificial Intelligence

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internetandnetwork · 4 years

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Everything You Need to Know About Implementing AI in Web Development

Perform a Google search for “Artificial Intelligence,” and you’ll see billions of results popping up on your screen, displaying a marketplace controlled by AI applications. From healthcare, finance, education to marketing, retail and e-commerce, and even web development, all industries have begun adopting artificial intelligence. As a matter of fact, some research studies anticipate that by the end of this year, a vast majority of the customer relationships will be handled without the need for any human interaction (thanks to this pandemic for furthermore accelerating this process). And this is no assumption. We can already see this happening around us in the form of chatbots across most websites. In fact, at one point or another, all of us have used a site powered by artificial intelligence without even knowing. However, if you still don’t agree with this, just go through a couple of your favorite websites that you visit almost every day and observe how they are using AI.

It takes a good deal of time and effort to build an appealing, perceptive, and responsive website, and this definitely does not happen in one night. The website building process involves building prototypes, creating sitemaps, testing, and various other steps. But with the evolution of technologies such as AI and machine learning, designing and developing such high-performance websites has become easier now than ever. In this blog, we will discuss such use cases of artificial intelligence in web development. It’s time to dig deeper!

Artificial Intelligence Use Cases in Web Development

SMART CHATBOTS

Enhancing the customer experience and ultimately boosting sales is one of the primary reasons for implementing AI in web design and development. AI-based chatbots imitate human interaction to offer the best possible customer experience, and it is pretty obvious that they have been doing an incredible job at it, given that they are increasingly becoming a standard component of modern website design and development. Customers today want and expect personalization at each step in the buyer journey, whether it is the content they read or products/services they are offered. AI is reforming website development by offering smart chatbots at key steps in the customer journey hence enhancing interaction, ensuring customer satisfaction, and minimizing the dependence on other resources.

For example, Sephora’s chatbot asks questions from the users before carrying on the conversation. Then according to the answers the user has given, the chatbot offers practical suggestions, recommends suitable products, offers tips related to makeup, and much more.

From monitoring and analyzing daily issues customers face to understanding their behavioral patterns, chatbots are proving to be extremely beneficial in tackling conversations by itself with excellent accuracy. AI-based chatbots are achieving sophistication and tend to become a component on more or less all websites in the coming time. So, if you are a web developer and want to stay sought-after in the long run, you might want to learn how to implement an AI chatbot in the website development process. However, if you plan to create a bot on your own, learning a bit about machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing will help you accomplish it.

ARTIFICIAL DESIGN INTELLIGENCE (ADI)

The lifeblood of artificial intelligence in web development lies in automating the website design and development. ADI or artificial design intelligence is like the new web designer on the block, creating its own websites with the help of machine learning. Human intervention is only required in the initial stages to provide the desired input. Once the input is given, ADI takes over and builds a personalized design according to it, delivering the users what they want in a timeframe that once seemed impossible to accomplish. Although this is still in its early stages, several popular ADI tools such as Wix ADI and Adobe Sensei have taken this industry by storm for automating the website design processes.

However, as mentioned earlier, artificial design intelligence has not fully developed yet to be able to take the place of humans. For example, when it comes to accomplishing detailed tasks such as cropping pictures (which needs intricate detailing), ADI’s work doesn’t match up with a professional designer’s work. But these ADI tools certainly serve as excellent catalysts to human web designers by simplifying their tasks and helping them save more time and effort.

VOICE-BASED INTERACTIONS

Voice-only search allows users to surf the web without even scrolling through websites, and this might help the brands to succeed in the future.

Voice Search Optimization is one of the emerging trends in website design. Today, all users want to acquire the information they need about any product, service, or topic in the fastest and easiest way possible. Voice search has already become very popular in web development, especially in the eCommerce industry. This means that users can directly perform search queries by just speaking their questions clearly. Artificial Intelligence plays a crucial role in making sure that a clear and in tune voice conversation takes place between the user and the website.

For example, Amazon’s Alexa voice service can seamlessly search for music in Spotify, find products on Amazon, and scour Wikipedia at a simple voice command by a user. This indicates how the top brands are already at the leading edge of voice search optimization to boost conversions and generate brand awareness.

Conclusion – It’s Time to Upskill

Wrapping it up, Artificial Intelligence today has pulled it off through the doors of every sector that we can think of currently.

Web development is one of the few sectors that tend to change forever by experimenting and learning AI-based programs on its own. It is evident that AI does have an immense potential of reducing the web development initial obstacles. However, it won’t be able to replace human web developers in the near future. But developers do need to modify their skill set in order to use AI in web development and stand apart from the crowd.

Artificial intelligence is soon going to become an indispensable component of a web developer’s toolkit. Developers will have to turn into a cross-breed of machine learning engineers, programmers, and web designers. As more and more businesses are adopting AI in their everyday operations, the demand for web developers who are proficient in AI will only increase in the coming time.

Hariom Balhara is an inventive person who has been doing intensive research in particular topics and writing blogs and articles for E Global Soft Solutions. E Global Soft Solutions is a digital marketing, seo, smo, ppc and web development company that comes with massive experiences. We specialize in digital marketing, web designing and development, graphic design, and a lot more.

SOURCE : Everything You Need to Know About Implementing AI in Web Development

#web development #Google #website #website designing #digital marketing #E Global Soft Solutions #SEO

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un-enfant-immature · 4 years

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Hollywood’s Triller sets its own rhythm even as it gains from TikTok troubles

Triller, the short video app backed by a Hollywood mogul and music celebrities, is rapidly ballooning in both user size and valuation. It’s now seeking a new funding round of $250 million that will push its valuation to over $1 billion, according to a source with knowledge of the matter.

That’s a leap from its $130 million valuation reported last October. Triller’s founder and CEO Mike Lu declined to comment, although another executive confirmed the funding with Dot.la.

The app has emerged as what many see as a TikTok replacement, but it has been around since 2015, two years before TikTok’s debut, and has its own “identity and ecosystem,” the founder insisted.

According to Lu, Triller was already recording “significant growth” even before the Trump administration began mulling a ban or a forced sale of TikTok, although he also admitted the app is getting a boost from the TikTok backlash. 35 million new users joined Triller just within the last few days. The app has so far collected 250 million downloads worldwide.

The Los Angeles-based startup still has a long way to catch up with TikTok, which crossed 2 billion downloads in April. The rivals both tout their capability to let users match videos with music, a defining feature for their success. In fact, Triller recently filed a lawsuit accusing its Chinese rival for infringing its patent for “creating music videos synchronized with an audio track.”

Triller attributed part of its achievement to majority investor Proxima Media, the Hollywood studio founded by Ryan Kavanaugh. Lu said his company has spent zero in marketing to reach its size, something that “has never happened in technology history.” But Ryan, the film producer and financier behind hits like The Fast and the Furious and The Social Network, has no doubt brought unmatched media exposure, celebrity connections, and naturally, their fans who convert to Triller users.

Made with @triller #triller do you have what it takes?Finding the worlds next #superstar. @migos @starrah the new #americanidol @boostmobile pic.twitter.com/x0DlNttoaA

— Ryan Kavanaugh (@RyanKavanaugh) May 10, 2020

Triller has also secured deals with major record labels, clearing the way for users to make music-centered videos. Its roster of angel investors include Snoop Dogg, The Weekend, Marshmellow, Lil Wayne, among other big names.

“Ryan is second to none in Hollywood, entertainment and media,” said Lu. “I give [Proxima Media] a ton of credit for helping us get to this stage, this massive growth. I don’t think we could have done it without them.”

Celebrity-quality content is one thing that sets Triller apart from TikTok, said Anis Uzzaman, general partner of Pegasus Tech Ventures, which invested in Triller in a strategic round.

“TikTok tries to grow its own celebrities. Triller already has all the big celebrities,” the investor said, refering to videos shared by Alicia Keys, Cardi B, Marshmellow, and Eminem via Triller, which is now a popular place for releasing songs. TikTok has also become a testing ground for artists to test new works.

Meanwhile, the app strives to keep its ordinary users engaged, one thing TikTok has done very well. For example, it boasts of AI-powered editing features that enable users to make professionally looking music videos. It’s also lanched a Billboard chart that ranks the biggest Triller songs, leveling the playing field between emerging creators and celebrities.

“It gives the young people a feeling that they are close to celebrities,” observed Uzzaman.

The investor also believes there’s room for multiple players in the short video space, akin to how Uber and Lyft co-exist. Indeed, China has seen TikTok’s Chinese version Douyin going head to head with Kuaishou in recent years.

For Lu, Triller’s identity is anchored in music, especially hip hop music in the early days, with a demographic of 18-25.

Triller’s App Store images.

TikTok, in comparison, can be everything from light-hearted dance videos to goofy skits. One gets a hint of their differences from the visuals they picked for their App Store pages.

TikTok’s App Store images.

The TikTok alts

The fate of TikTok could still change dramatically in the coming weeks, although so far, there’s a decent chance that Microsoft may scoop up the Chinese-owned app. Some startups are betting that their US identity will help them win over users from TikTok, but a survey done by California-based Creative Digital Agency suggests that may not be the case.

65% of the hundreds of TikTok users it asked said they won’t feel more comfortable with their data policies even if TikTok were an American company, and 84.6% believe the proposed ban is motivated by political concerns.

“The vast majority believe that all American social media platforms are doing exactly the same thing in mining personal data, which is the big privacy concern,” the agency’s managing director Kevin Almeida suggested.

That said, TikTok’s growth has slowed down recently, as some creators hedge the risk of losing followers in the case of a ban. The app’s installs in the US last week were down 7% compared to the four-week average, shows data from analytics firm Sensor Tower. Its total downloads in the US are close to 190 million.

Triller is hardly the only US startup thriving against the backdrop of TikTok’s uncertain future. At least three other micro-video apps have seen new downloads in the hundreds of thousands in the US over the past week, according to Sensor Tower, and two are rooted in China.

They are Byte, Dom Hofmann’s new app after Vine was shuttered by Twitter; Zynn, which is run by Kuaishou, TikTok’s Chinese homegrown rival; and Likee, operated by Bigo, a Singapore-based company acquired by China’s YY. These apps totaled downloads of 2.9 million, 6.4 million, and 16.3 million in the US, respectively.

Growth of TikTok’s old rival Dubsmash isn’t as remarkable but the app has the most US installs among the competitors, reaching 41.6 million recently.

In comparison, Triller has accumulated 23.8 million downloads in the US. The app has seen a surge in downloads in India following the country’s TikTok ban, but it has also ranked among the top photo and video apps across multiple European and African countries where TikTok remains accessible.

The company operates a global team of 350 employees, most of whom are in the US and work on content operation and engineering.

#TechCrunch

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gocchisama · 7 years

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Rollercoaster of Emotion : A Keyakizaka Story

The “Republic of Keyakizaka” concert took place the week end of 22-23 July, in FujiQ conifer forest. With a schedule matching mine, i had the privilege to attend the two days full of keyakizaness, from unique scenery inside the park to the sharp performance of the girls. I will attempt to bring as much anecdote from the inside as i can, and yes there’s a lot of things to say!

The concert took place near the popular attraction park FujiQ Highland.

Getting tickets as a foreigner might be an hassle. I had to create a Rakuten account, an EMTG account, have a credit card that works, a japanese phone number and address. You can get the last two by submitting to tenso, a japanese service specialized in shipping Japanese goods. After that, it was first come first served so web servers were saturated from fans multiple connections, disabling the service for those who have poor internet. Fortunately the venue capacity was big (12 000 seats) and some gave up because the venue was too far from tokyo (2 hours from bus/3 from train). 6 hours after the start of the selling, i managed to buy 2 tickets (i didn’t choose seats). Something hard, was also to book a bus ( most japanese fans rushed to this service as well) and all hotel were book. I got lucky to find a very affordable airbnb (guesthouse online service) and managed to secure a super early Bus from tokyo to the venue. Vacations were finally starting!

A sneak peek of the queuing line for Keyakizaka goods. There’s three of them.

There’s a reason i wanted to come early: exclusive goods! I wasn’t satisfied with the towel available on the official online store, but the one sold at the venue was a real “coup de coeur”. Hirate Yurina being a very popular member, i didn’t wanted to face a sold-out situation. I arrived at 10AM and the show started at 5PM(afternoon). But there was already a massive line worth 1.5 hours! Easy to tell that Goods are really popular items of collection. I thought i was going to wait in hellfire, but weather was cloudy and the forest around were kind of absorbing the heat. Also we were waiting below the fujiyama rollercoaster so it was fun to see people getting scared 60m above our line. What surprised me was how disciplined fans were : patiently waiting their turn, and quickly purchasing their goods. What looked really long actually moved quite fast. Aki-p was also prepared : there was a huge amount of package behind the selling staff to fulfill everyone’s otaku needs. Thumbs up for japanese neat organization!

Exclusive goods were affordable and high quality.

i was positively surprised at the goods prices. 3000Y 100% cotton T shirts, 3000Y lighsticks and 2000Y the god of items, the oshi towel. Aside from the oshi towel, the biggest value for me was the exclusive fanclub keyakizaka bandana (the one on my bag) with the unbeatable price of 300Y. There was also this 4500Y exclusive T shirt with handmade blazer “humility, kindness, bond” but i skipped due to budget reasons. The highlight was also keyakizaka photoset : for 1000Y, they give you a set of 5 random pictures, either from special silent majority (kohaku version) to futari season (gold uniform). I had a good pull with yuipon, moriya, shida manaka. When i got out, there were hundreds of fans trading like crazy to complete their sets! Some had 30 000 Y worth of photos, just to get a chance to have their oshimen sets complete. As you can expect, a lot of fans keep popular members set for their own collection, and to trade them is very rare. The trading was a raging battle and with my poor 5 pictures, i didn’t tried to join the fray. Even though i could probably catch Yurina... let’s hope for another chance in the summer tour!

There was so many keyakizaka fans that the park could have been renamed Keyakizaka land.

Keyakizaka performing in Conifere forest was undoubtly a big collaboration with FujiQ Highland. Sony management get a big venue and promotion from FujiQ, while FujiQ ultra boost its attendance rate with all the wota coming to have a good time in the park. I won’t be surprised if they do it again. The scenery was unreal : almost 70% of the park customers were wearing their oshi towel and keyaki T-shirts. After all, the 1500Y admission pass was free for those who had concert tickets (but you have to pay the biggest rollercoasters). It was a great opportunity for group of friends to attend both fujiQ and keyakizaka GIG, but also couples and families. There was members panel scattered over the whole park and fans had to search for their oshi (see above). You could see who were popular according to the lane of fans waiting to get the perfect shot. Zuumin, Monarisa, Neru always had a lane. Techi was very well hidden (at the near edge between 2 rollercoaster) and had like 100 members queuing for her! It took me 1h to find the panel and take a picture, but the hide and seek game was fun.

About the sociology : after a lot of observation, i would say the ratio is 75-25 boys/girls, and most of them were very young 15-20 years old. They probably didn’t lived the Acchan era, and that explain why AKB is declining : AKB didn’t managed to appeal to this new fandom; Nogizaka and Keyaki did. I haven’t seen goods related to other idol group, even from Nogizaka. It was really all about Keyaki. I’ll be honest, it was hard to connect with fans. Langage barrier, also they were already hanging in groups of friend/Focus on trading. I chatted a bit with fans when i was queueing in Fujiyama rollercoaster, and they were surprised i came from France, but that’s about it. On a side note, Fujiyama has nice attractions like Eee janai ka (see videos on youtube) so please check it out for one day (you don’t need more, and go on weekdays) if you have the opportunity to do so!

The actual venue, with a big stage looking like a castle with flags ornaments.

The actual venue was very convenient. There were a lot of staff guiding fans and you just had to cross the bridge to be at the concert. Lot of policemen, security was strict, checking bags and ID. Impossible to resell ticket thanks to this, even with accompany status (the concert didn’t sold out anyway). How it was organized : seats were spread through blocks. For example, if you get A block, you’re very close to the stage, and if you get the number 7-9, you are in the center of the venue. Kami seats were not A1(on the edge, but still good), but A7 (sooo close). Since i bought ticket late, i had F2, which is quite bad, but i was already glad to be there. I had the big left screen to follow the concert (picture above). You were given a balloon to use it during Sekai ni wa ai shikanai. Saturday i would say was filled at 95%, and Sunday was 90%. Mission accomplished.

The girls appeared in brand new horsemen-inspired costume, holding (*cough* confederate *cough*) flags.

The show was finally starting! Big new instrumental intro to lift the atmosphere, again with the army style. People wavering their greenlighstick, all standing up. Techi was standing in the middle with her badass stare like the leader of the army. After this intro, they played Overture and followed by the 3 first singles. First thing i wanted to confirm : No zuumin (imaizumi Yui) also Yonetani nanami chose to focus on her studies in the meantime. Anyway choregraphy went smoothly and the crowd was cheering and doing the mix (wota chant). It’s our way to tell the girls we’re enjoying our time and mutually motivating ourselves. It’s our way to communicate! Overall members had good expressions, like Moriya, Yuuka and Neru, but also Satoh shiori and uemura rina that were dancing on my side. Others like Berika and Techi were kind of warming up, trying to avoid making mistakes.

There were a lot of interactions between fans and the group. Shida Manaka particulary enjoyed shooting on fans but also members.

Aozora and Bokutachi no sensou were pretty original : they put the crowd into work sending big floating air balls that we were bumping around the venue, and girls had waterstream to shower the first lanes. Other members had waterguns. It was really festive and even though bokutachi no sensou is not my favourite song, people were having fun. Aozora to marry is a fan favourite, as the calls were very strong.

Techi entering the scene the coolest way possible

Techi was singing live, with a playback running behind. A double edged sword as if her pitch was off, it could be distinguishly heard, so she focused a lot on her singing. Her voice is more girly than the studio version, which was cute. However, because she wanted to do good, she was restraining herself and her moves lacked expressions. She didn’t interacted much with the crowd, making her cold. As if she was aware of her mistake, she did significantly better Sunday and she felt much more natural. Hearsaying on my way home, a lot were satisfied with her performance, as her aura is “yabai” (so impressive)

Yurina’s performance was followed by Hiragana keyaki 2 songs, “hiragana keyaki” and “boku wa tsukiatteru”. I was pleasantly surprised at how genki, smiling and fluffy the girls were, lifting up the crowd even more. They were so much more expressive than Kanji singles it kind of woke up everyone. The song in studio is standard orthodox idol, but it is a killer during live performance because the lyrics are easy to remember and moves easy to mimic. Very good surprise, i saw myself tagging along, leaving behind all regrets to look ridicule. At the end, Sasaki kumi took charge of the MC. I can see she is comfortable with talking, but topics to talk about could be improved. Other girls were short to comment.

Waterworks were giving density to the rare performed “Otona wa shinjite kurenai”

Kanji are back with the great “otona wa shinjite kurenai” and the very anticipated “eccentric”. Very solid performance, very sharp and powerful. The girls are in their element and Techi is finally unleashing the darkness within her. We don’t have mix in this song, but people were amazed and couldn’t speak much. It gaves a stronger feeling than Silent majority. Less mainstream, much deeper. I really liked it. Great follow up with Eccentric, people argued the choregraphy was a hit or miss, but i would say definitevely a hit! If felt like the girls were having erratic spasm, but did synchronized move as well. Very technical. The song itself is good, and i saw myself doing the wakame dance (waving my arms), shuffling my towel (while they use their shoes) and shaking my chest. (that was weird).

Something i noticed too in Hohoemi Ga kanashii and Wareta Smartphone. Because Techi is a little bit cranky and mechanical, the chemistry with Neru is not perfect. Techi shines in dark songs, but on her path to become a great idol, she needs to express herself more in normal situation. It feels like Neru is assisting her rather than being a balanced pairing. On the other song, Berika is reminding me of Paruru, doing the barely minimum during performance. I know it’s funny to put someone awkward in a sexy song, but i don’t think it’s helping her to grow. The contrast with the sexyness of Moriya is making her look bad. She looks more comfortable in songs like Aozora ga chigau. In the meantime, Mona risa are fooling around while Yuuka try to focus on the choregraphy. I personally like Wareta smartphone.

Sometimes the wota culture can be misunderstood.

We reached a climax with the 3 last songs, “Kataru nara mirai wo”, “Takaku tobe” and “Te wo tsunaide Kaerou ka”? Kataru Nara is an absolute jewel of choregraphy and the mix were really strong. Before that we had a Hiragana and Kanji dance medley very similar to what happened in Ariake. Some moves were recycled, but i don’t mind as the girl had little time to practice. Special shoutout to Suzumoto Miyu who is by far the best dancer of the groupe. Saito Kyoko dance battled with her and she was very decent too. As people were hyping, they send Takaku tobe which once again blowed me away at how popular of a song it was. Perhaps the instrumental got changed to sound more upbeat, but everyone was tagging along with the moves and quirky mimics. Hiragana songs are really popular! To answer to that, Kanji Keyaki used Te wo tsunaide, another popular song that worship the yuukanen pairing. People were warming up at Yuukanen chasing each other, in a very cute way. The cheering was pretty even with Takaku tobe.

The Encore escalated quickly, with loud screams and fireworks.

To me the big highlight was the encore, Fukyouwaon. People knew it was the last powerful song so we kind of put everything to it. The girls exploded and the pyrotechnics made it look like a warfield. It was so funny i shouted “boku wa yada” with Techi similar to if i was in hellfest, surprising people next to me (i thought it was part of the mix , sorry). Anyway, people did their best mix and you couldn’t hear the rollercoaster next to us. Fukyouwaon went from the “weakest” A-side to “best A-side on stage” haaands down. It was truly marvelous and you could see the girls were enjoying the crowd hype as their moves were growing in power (Techi was smiling from enjoyment).

Finally we finished with our anthem kanji/hiragana together, Keyakizaka no Uta. We kind of let loose after the final rush and enjoyed the last bit of time together. We had fireworks and it almost felt the girls weren’t aware. Since we were around 7PM, it was night and you could completely see the fireworks. People were having a blast. I heard “sugeee” “yabaaai” “majiiii de” from everywhere when it started to lighten up the sky.

Aki-p used credit card platinum. It was very effective.

In conclusion, it was a great experience to live as a fan. You could either skip Saturday or Sunday as it was the same setlist. Unfortunately, Yonetani and Zumiko absence were quite heavy, leaving their fans bittersweet. Also there was only eccentric as new song, making fans craving for more. That’s why it can’t beat Ariake coliseum yet. But fear not! Because Keyaki summer schedule is very busy; they still have to perform the summer tour, handshakes, summer sonic, fuji rock and Tokyo idol festival. I think Zuumin will come back avoiding the hectic schedule, just in time for their biggest stop, Makuhari Messe. Keyaki story is not over yet!

I was impressed once again by japanese crowd control. They brought special train for people to come back safely to tokyo. The guideline was perfect, and they regulate trains so people don’t overcrowd it. Also it was free, so i only paid 500 yen to come back from Fujisan to Chiba! They really do the maximum for the fans and i’m really grateful.

It’s not all the time you see a town full of wota, wearing their oshi towel like it’s pretty standard; to see fans helping each other to take turns of 2shots, praising their respective oshimen quality; a young daughter refusing his also-fan dad to accompany her in handshake to not be embarassed in front of her oshimen... Now i realized what the true meaning of “republic of keyakizaka” is : people bonding, having fun together, enjoying life around the positive energy that brings the group.

- Gocchisama

En route toward new keyaki adventures! Thanks for reading.

#keyakizaka46 #akb48 #livereport #欅坂46 #平手友梨奈 #hirate yurina

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