Da-boo! (aka Obligatory Lord of the Rings Post)

You may have seen this in Boing Boing already—in fact, I think this story was floating around last year in the lead up to The Two Towers. But what the hell, I like orcs.

Flocking CGI Orcs Are Too Smart to Stand and Fight
Computer animators have been using cellular automata in their crowd scenes for some time, granting the orcs in LotR the liberty to autonomously determine the fine details of their movement, creating realistic mob scenes that appear to contain a cast of thousands. The problem is, as the programming for the automata gets more sophisticated, they start to express non-linear behavior.

In the climax for The Return of the King, the animated forces of evil kept running away from their enemies.

"So each of these computerized soldiers is assessing the environment around them, drawing on a repertoire of military moves that have been taught them through motion capture - determining how they will combat the enemy, step over the terrain, deal with obstacles in front of them through their own intelligence - and there's 200,000 of them doing that..."

"For the first two years, the biggest problem we had was soldiers fleeing the field of battle," Taylor said. "We could not make their computers stupid enough to not run away." [more]

I find the image of reluctant CGI warriors charming and even a little poignant. Those poor little orcs! Who can blame them for fleeing the battle? It is rigged, after all. Maybe they're conscientious orc objectors. Maybe they didn't vote for Sauron. Maybe they'd just rather be on the couch watching curling instead of marching into certain death at the hands of Orlando Bloom. When I see the big battle scenes in Return of the King I'm going to be keeping an eye on the corners of the screen, hoping for at least a few grunts or peons to turn tail and get away. Run, little AWOL AI orcs! Run like the wind!

NEStalgia

I am mesmerized tonight by two little videos which appear to be flawless run-throughs of the old Nintendo games Super Mario Bros 3 and Mega Man 2. (Both links go direct to streaming videos.) I played the crap out of both of these games in the NES years with my siblings and then with foogie in our frosh dorm room at Crazy Go Nuts University. There's considerable nostalgia mojo just in hearing the music and watching Mario and Mega Man pogo around. But can these videos really be actual games, "filmed" in a single "take"? Or have they been edited or manipulated? They are, I repeat, flawless performances. It's cooler to imagine they represent actual play, but I really don't want to think about the hours necessary to hone one's game to this kind of robotic precision.

For more Nintendo nostalgia, you can do no better than Seanbaby's NES and Mega Man pages: "Metal Man. He was some robot that was made out of metal. He was the dork of the group. I mean, all of the other guys are made out of metal too, but they have other cool stuff. It's like you getting a costume that says, "Human Man," and trying to fight crime." Hee.

Tangent #1: A trivia fact for those that didn't know me in the early 1990s. In the fall of 1991, I painted a portrait of the Mario Brothers on the back of my red leather university jacket. It looked hella sharp and was not at all dorky! despite what you might now suspect. It was in fact exceedingly cool and I will stand by that interpretation. If you didn't recognize Mario and Luigi (and in 1991, most people over the age of eleven didn't), the icons were strangely compelling, cheerful yet unsettling in that iconic Japanese design way. And if you did recognize them, then you had to give me props for being way out in front of the hipster appropriation of Japanese kiddie culture. foogie and I actually set off a bit of a campus fad for jacket-painting, I think. (OK, by the end it might have gotten a little dorky.)

Tangent #2: I've got both videos playing in separate windows on my desktop as I type this. Mario and Mega Man have very distinctive jumping arcs. Even without the raccoon ears that give him the power of flight (for some reason), Mario's broadjump beats the fuck out of Mega Man's. But Mega has that adorable anime leaping pose.

Edit: Word on the street tells me that the Mario video, at least, is faked. My faith in humanity is simultaneously damaged and restored.