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[pygame] Niss



Luke Paireepinart wrote:
I hope this is an addon to NISS and you haven't straight-up abandoned her ;)

Heh! No way. Now that exams are done I can actually do some work... Could use any input you have.


<rambling>
My problem with Niss right now is that I don't know what sort of application I'm building. I toyed with several 3D engines:
-Panda3D: native to Python, but it's generally ugly. Creepy, disturbing "Hello World" video.
-CrystalSpace: extensive hazing process just to install for Python; finally gave up
-Ogre3D: PyOgre finally has the CEGUI interface working. Would look nice.


I look at Ogre screenshots and think that anything I'd make with it would automatically look nicer than anything I've done in Pygame. Plus it's 3D. But unless I use billboarding, I'd need fancy custom 3D characters, and they'd look bad unless they were also animated a bit. So, should I even attempt 3D? In contrast, won't people likely dismiss anything I do in Pygame because it's not nearly as pretty as an Ogre program?

Where I left off, I had the "Aquablue" system: an ugly but functional endless scrolling map with crude editor and mostly-there sprite code. Should I just use that and focus on refining it? It's innately 2D unless I build in warps to other maps that represents building interiors etc, and that means no hills -- just flat islands. But that's OK for an AI demo and maybe even for a game.

Should I be focused on making a playable game out of it, or on a simple demo of the AI doing smart things? Or on some kind of potentially marketable AI chat thing?

I'm _not_ going to enter the Loebner Prize Contest again this year. I don't have anything substantially better for that than I did last year, and Loebner's doing odd things with the contest requirements. I've got various partly-implemented new ideas for the knowledge/decision system.

There's more on my brainstorming at http://niss-the-ai.livejournal.com/2006/05/13/ .

</rambling>

Kris