Hello everyone. I hope you all had a happy holiday.

A friend of mine made an interesting comment about me this last week. She said that I am not used to people disagreeing with me, My initial reaction was to get a little angry. I think this is something of a harsh indictment. It occurs to me, however, that it is unfortunately true.

I have been fortunate in that I have always been told that I am intelligent. On the other hand the risk of this is not that I might begin to believe but rather that I might take it too far. When I feel like I know what I am talking about or am expressing an opinion I tend to believe, at some level, that I am right. I guess this is natural. I think, however, that my friend may have been trying to point out that I let the courage of my convictions close my mind. Something else to add to the list...

All this self-criticism is getting me nowhere, unfortunately.

Another thing that this made me realize, somewhat belatedly, is how useful it is to really see yourself through someone elses eyes. Friends are particularly good at this. I guess the caveat is to make sure you notice the good things they reflect along with the flaws.

Have I mentioned that I'm a virgo lately?

I was thinking about being childlike today. Not childish mind you, but childlike. The difference is important. The goal, if there was one, was to recapture some of the awe and naivete of kids. This makes for interesting mental exercise.

One interesting offshoot of this line of thinking was attempting to predict the reactions of other adults to one of their peers behaving in such a manner. I can't decide. I think there are some people who would be delighted and refreshed by it. The flipside is that there are some who would be terribly irritated.

It's almost as if there is some subooncious expectation in the adult mind that all other adults are at least somewhat jaded and world-weary. I can see how encountering someone that is actively casting that aside would be a little threatening. The irony of this, in my odd little model, is that it's a negative feedback loop. Our heroine is likely to receive reponses that only reinforce the very type of thinking she is trying to free herself from.

The idea of peer pressure being at least partly responsible for governing these types of fundamental personality traits is kind of scary. Food for thought...

I like to think that the world truly can be met with a very simple kind of thinking. A thinking that doesn't leave room for negatives. Encountering everything as if it is new and a new opportunity could, I suspect, be very rewarding. I guess it would take a lot of self-disicipline to enter and exit this kind of mode when you need to, though. On the other hand, I read somewhere that the human brain doesn't process negatives.

As I have mentioned previously, I play Everquest. One thing that I have always found terribly lacking in EQ is decent AI. Monsters wander around mindlessly and in huge numbers. NPC shopkeepers sit in their shops 24 hours a day and gaze sightlessly at walls or some point just behind you.

I would like to propose something different. In fact, I would like to propose two somethings. For starters, how about some simple motivations. With a few little tweaks you could give fire beetles a purpose for clacking about outside freeport... say.. they're hungry. Shopkeepers could need sleep and be cranky about being awoken by lunatic adventurers without the sense to get a good night's rest. This is a little thing that would add a tremendous amount of depth to game for little cost.

Proposition two is simply communication. At least the word itself is simple to type but adding it to the game is another matter. How about this though: What if NPCs, which are, at a programming level, simply objects with methods and member data, could communicate a little of their state to any of their kind (or related) near enough to hear? An example:

Orc A, a big, beefy, vegetarian centurion is hungry for some greens. Orc B is wimpy little pawn that just happens to be near enough to A to be on the hot-seat. A, being, as orcs are wont, notoriously rude and lazy growls his hunger at B. B, being the weaker, know's that he had best go find A some greens or he may well end up in the stew pot for some of his less vegetarian peers.

Let's examine this admittedly goofy example for it's practicality. Orcs, like all objects in the game, have stats... one of which is likely strength. Another of these stats is level. It's now simple to determine that A is, in every way that orcs measure such things, superior to B. Great. Now, another stat that A probably doesn't have at present is some kind of measure of his level of hunger. Ok, let's add one... while we're at it let's add a bit of code to make this number change.

Now we have a hungry orc. The next step is to build a table of behaviors. To keep things simple we'll have two outcomes associated with hunger. The first of which is to bellow at those around, the second is to go out and find some food. We'll put bellowing first for orcs to give them their stereotypical laziness... actually foraging is going to be a last resort.

Now we need bellowing to convey some kind of message... let say... HUNGRY. Now, at last there is meaning. One problem, I hear you cry. Communication requires at least two parties. Ok. Let's give our orcs some ears by giving them a message queue or some similar construct. Now, when A bellows B gets a HUNGRY message in his message queue. We have to also make note that the message came from A. Now let's make it so we pull messages out of the queue and check in a table to see what we need to do. In this case B can ascertain that A will liekly kick his ass if he doesn't get cracking.

Not only do we now have simple communication but we also have an orc pawn that is out foraging instead of simply waiting to be slaughtered by the first lowbie to come along. Yet more depth.

Don't I make this sound easy? Of course reality was bound to rear it's ugly head sooner or later. Say we have 250ish creatures in an area that implement this simple communication. That is most likely a hefty chunk of extra cpu cycles we're suddenly soaking up. I like to dream, though.

</dork>

I've been doing some reading lately... in fact, quite a lot. I wish I could say I was getting any closer to the bottom of my "books-to-read" stack but it just seems to be getting deeper and deeper. This is a good thing.

My current book is Paulo Coehlo's _The Alchemist_. Marka recommended it to me and thus far I have been impressed. The style is clean, simple, and almost lyrical. One thing that is really odd about this particular book, though, is that every paragraph seems to have some kind of zinger line or idea. It makes for an unusual reading experience. I can't tell whether it's fiction or self-help.

Whew. I just got finished proof-reading this. I apologize for all the errors but I am just too tired to fix them now. G'night. Love you all.