My Ph.D. student Waleed and I were late coming back from a Targeted Excellence meeting on comptranslation, so I asked zengeneral to hold down the fort.

He gave a rather nice overview of the massforge project. His description of the short film was hilarious.

Here is the blurb from the user info page of the community:

MASSFORGE is the working name for the open-source core of a full-featured artificial life and intelligent agents-based multi-character animation system.

This core will be written in C and C++ with OpenGL, with intelligent agent and decision modeling aspect performed by the Bayesian Network tools in Java (BNJ) library or a C++ version of it.

Besides the core, our team is developing a closed-source reuse library of charater models and agents called (free for noncommercial use) called Kansas Agents-Based Animation Library (KABAL) and possibly one or more commercialized front-end applications known collectively as Bundle of Intelligent Tools for Simultaneous Interaction (BITSI).

To date, zengeneral's made a lot of progress on the rendering engine, scene geometry representation, environment, and intelligent control infrastruture. If you're interested in this code, subscribe to massforge and askbeg zengeneral for it!

Oh, BTW: have college students today really never heard of V? As in red powder, giant water-stealing ships, peel-away faces, lizardbabies, etc.? Wow. I feel old.

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Banazir