The biggest challenge so far for The Restaurant Game has been the fact that two people need to be online at the same time. While about 90 people have logged onto The Restaurant Game, many of them have quit before finding another player online. Version 1.6 remedies this problem with the new Restaurant Vacancy Notification Widget! Players can choose to minimize the game to a small lightweight window that displays counts of the current number of Waitresses and Customers needed on the servers. No more hitting the Server Refresh button over and over. Just sit back, relax, wait for the widget to "ding" you, then jump on in!
This Wednesday night (Feb 28) at 9pm EST will be our final server test, before spreading the word about this project to a wider audience. We're going to fill all 20 servers at once to test the load. Grab theResturant v1.6 and join in.
The pilot tests of The Restaurant Game continue! This weekend on Saturday and Sunday we will run tests at 5pm in every time zone. Choose a time zone that works for you, and come online. This should make it a little easier for our friends in Europe (and elsewhere) to participate. As always, you are welcome to play any other time too, but you are more likely to find other players at 5pm.
Download the latest version of the game here:
http://theRestaurantGame.net
Read more about this project in my previous post: 1,000 Players Can’t Be Wrong.
Thanks everyone for all of the support in the tests so far. 18 games have been logged in the first two nights, played by 24 unique players. So far the game is only advertised on this blog. Next week I will advertise the game more widely.
How long do you think it will take to get to 1,000 games? “Never” is an acceptable answer. I think we can do it within one month -- by March 25.
EDIT: To answer my own question, two weeks. In two weeks 1,074 games have been played. I am now shooting for 10,000.
The primary responsibility of a game AI programmer is to anticipate player behavior, and provide satisfying responses for every anticipated scenario. With each generation of games this gets more difficult, as virtual worlds become more realistic with additions like real-time physics simulation. I’m working on a research project that flips the traditional approach to game AI on its head. My goal is to capture gameplay from 1,000 multiplayer game sessions, analyze this data, and use it to generate AI for a new single player game this summer.
Read more and download game at:
http://theRestaurantGame.net
The simple game I’ve created does not have real-time physics, but it does require conversation between players via typed text, which proves equally challenging -- in both cases no matter how many games you observe, you will never see the exact same scenario play out twice. It is unrealistic to believe human AI programmers will ever account for the nuances of every possible scenario. Think about an analogy to animation – when animators want convincing human movement, they go straight to the source and use motion capture. Animators blend, layer, sequence captured animations to generate new motions beyond those recorded. Why should we believe that authoring AI behaviors is any different – perhaps we can get the most believable results by starting with the source material, and procedurally blending, layering, and sequencing behaviors as we see fit.
I’m not expecting people to play my game and get nothing in return. Players will be rewarded with Game Designer credit on the new game for contributing to this effort. It has never been easier to earn Game Designer credentials! I see this collaborative community-oriented approach as falling in line with other successful examples of leveraging the power of the network to overcome insatiable demands for content such as Spore, the ESP game, flickr, and myspace.
Of course, collecting gameplay data is only half the battle, but it is a start. The game produced this summer will employ the first of many iterations of the learning algorithm, and the corpus of data collected will be available for others to use as well (with player identifiers removed).
We are running our second set of pilot tests Thursday Feb 22 at 9pm EST AND 9pm PST. You are welcome to download and play any other time too, but wanted to set a time when people would be sure to find other players (because the game requires two players per server).
Read more and download game at:
http://theRestaurantGame.net
Does anyone read this Blog anymore?
I thought this would be a good place to announce a new game AI research project that I am launching in approx two weeks. I welcome the public to participate in this project. More accurately, I need the public to participate in this project. My research requires collecting data from over 1,000 people playing a short computer game (takes ~10 minutes). This project explores an alternative approach to authoring AI behaviors, and blurs the boundary between game players and game designers.
I will post again soon with more information when the game is ready for download, for WindowsXP and possibly Mac OSX too.