By David M. Ewalt
HERE, THERE BE DRAGONS.
Ancient pink dragons with 527 hit issues, +44 to assault, and a 20d10 breath weapon, to be particular. on the earth of fable role-playing, these numbers describe a winged serpent with big power and the facility to spit hearth. There are few beasts extra powerful—just like there are few video games extra vital than Dungeons & Dragons.
Even if you’ve by no means performed Dungeons & Dragons, you possibly recognize somebody who has: the sport has had a profound impression on our tradition. published in 1974—decades earlier than the web and social media—Dungeons & Dragons encouraged one of many unique nerd subcultures, and continues to be respected by means of thousands of fanatics world wide. Now the authoritative heritage and magic of the sport are printed via an award-winning journalist and lifetime D&D player.
In Of cube and Men, David Ewalt recounts the advance of Dungeons & Dragons from the game’s roots at the battlefields of historical Europe, throughout the hysteria that associated it to satanic rituals and teenage suicides, to its apotheosis as father of the fashionable video-game undefined. As he chronicles the unbelievable background of the game’s origins (a background mostly unknown even to hardcore avid gamers) and examines D&D’s profound influence, Ewalt weaves laser-sharp tradition research along with his personal present-day gaming studies. an attractive combination of heritage, journalism, narrative, and memoir, Of cube and Men sheds mild on America’s preferred (and extensively misunderstood) type of collaborative leisure.
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Additional resources for Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who Play It
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5 L AYOUT OF THE B OOK This book is split into five sections. Part One introduces AI and games in Chapters 1 and 2, giving an overview of the book and the challenges that face the AI developer in producing interesting game characters. Part Two is the meat of the technology in the book, presenting a range of different algorithms and representations for each area of our AI model. It contains chapters on decision making and movement and a specific chapter on pathfinding (a key element of game AI that has elements of both decision making and movement).
1 The AI model AI has implications for related technologies 10 Chapter 1 Introduction work on a character-by-character basis, and the last section operates on a whole team or side. Around these three AI elements is a whole set of additional infrastructure. Not all game applications require all levels of AI. Board games like Chess or Risk require only the strategy level; the characters in the game (if they can even be called that) don’t make their own decisions and don’t need to worry about how to move.
This book can’t hope to catalog and describe them all. When a key algorithm is described, I will often give a quick survey of the major variations in briefer terms. Performance Characteristics To the greatest extent possible, I have tried to include execution properties of the algorithm in each case. Execution speed and memory consumption often depend on the size of the problem being considered. I have used the standard O() notation to indicate the order of the most significant element in this scaling.