Travelogue

Europe Trip 2008

2008-08-04T22:37:42Z

My wife has an excellent writeup about our europe trip, so go here to read up on the trip. For more snaps from our europe trip go here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gromhellscream/collections/72157605716301730/

Tahoe & Skiing!

2008-01-11T19:17:48Z

3yrs have passed since I went to Tahoe last and this time around I am not single anymore!. Aruna was very very excited about this trip as she has never seen snow. We headed out in the wee hours of the morning towards Tahoe. As we drove up the CA-50 we started seeing snow in the hilltops but the best was yet to come. As we drove further the view changed dramatically with trees all around us covered in snow and all we could see was a white landscape like a scene out of a movie. Though this snap doesn't do justice to the view but it should give an idea. We stepped out for a couple of snaps and realized how cold it really was! My sneakers were no protection against the cold and within minutes we could feel the cold seeping through. We quickly took a couple of snaps and jumped right back into the car and drove on towards Tahoe. By now the traffic was increasing too and we didn't want to get caught in a long train of cars heading into Tahoe. After checking into our motel sometime later we all headed out to rent our ski gear and hit the slopes at sierra. I was kind of skeptical about my skiing abilities after last time's disaster but as it happens I was comfortable right off the bat and was able to ski without any major problems. Preparing to ski :) What came next I was completely unprepared for :) Trying to teach Aruna how to ski!. Now that was an adventure. We got to the beginner area slope and I started teaching Aruna how to put on her skis. For about 10 minutes I struggled to get her left foot onto the ski and lock and as soon as I would ask her to put on her right ski she would start losing balance and fall. Soon for some reason she was not even able to her ski boot to lock on the ski. This was really frustrating and as we came to know later her boot for some reason kept collecting a lot of snow on the sole and hence making it very difficult for her to lock her boots onto the ski. Only snap of mine on skis I think! The beautiful sierra slopes!. After spending about 15-20 minutes trying to teach Aruna we both decided it would be better if she signed up for learner lessons. After we signed her up for beginner lessons I decided to hit the slopes and I was surprised how comfortable I felt and was able to come down the slopes without falling!. Skiing becomes so much more fun when you don't fall!. I pretty much spent the day coming down the slope multiple times and watching wifey learn skiing. I must say its pretty entertaining to watch people who are learning to ski:) Especially my wifey who managed to fall in every possible angle! But at the end of the day she finally did manage to learn skiing and was able to ski a bit without fallling! I managed to capture the attempt in a video :-> ]]> After playing around for some more time in the snow we all decided to head into the hills around Tahoe for some superb views of the lake. All in all an amazing fun 2 day trip. Both of us look forward to going again next year and skiing together on the slopes!

The Next Game!

2007-12-29T18:41:52Z

As I had mentioned earlier after I quit WOW I was trying to find a game that would hold my interest beyond a few days. About 2 months back I bought Supreme Commander and though it was nice too look at and had good gameplay it was not much fun. It seemed like a souped up TA with pretty graphics. The sides were not distinctive enough the economic model was still the same etc and somehow I didnt like the fact that your units had no character. It felt like playing a board game and as a result I soon got bored of it and didnt play it much. Enter Universe at War: Earth Assault This has got be the most fun RTS I have seen since WC3. Warcraft 3 set the level for the RTS genre and I think UAW has borrowed the best from WC3 and Starcraft and then enhanced it more. The heroes concept from WC3 and the distinctive units from Starcraft. There are 3 sides namely Novus,Masari and the Hierarchy. The hierarchy are the evil race that invade earth to harvest it for resources and the Novus are a race of sentient machines who oppose hierarchy and come to earth to stop hierarchy. Masari are a race that at one time saved hierarchy but later were betrayed and the remanants of Masari were slumbering in earth and the coming of hierarchy has awakened them. Humanity sadly has little to no role in the game!. Each side has a unique economic model and resource costs. Where hierarchy sports Giant walkers which serve as garangutan war machines as well as production centers, the novus build flow networks and their units can flow along these networks to redeploy rapidly across the maps. Masari are the slow bloomers in the game and are like the protoss in Starcraft. They have incredibly hard to kill units but are expensive. Each side sports different super weapons and different heroes. Where novus relies on viral attacks to shut down enemy machines/take control etc the masari hero can teleport units around the map. The campaign is average in quality but the mulitplayer gameplay is just superb. I have been playing online on live though the population at this time is minimal the games are a lot of fun. 5 minute rushes that made warcraft/starcraft fun can happen as well as superb end game if you do survive the rushes. Overall a must play for any RTS fan!. http://petroglyphgames.com for more information

Thanksgiving and Yosemite

2007-12-14T15:45:11Z

I know its late:) but what the heck... I am a lazy blogger and an even lazier photo uploader!. We went to Yosemite during this thanksgiving weekend and I must say it was an interesting weekend. We left for yosemite around friday afternoon after standing 9 hrs in the cold for the black friday sale and came home empty handed as the thing we wanted got over before we could get it:(. We reached yosemite around 6 in the evening and checked into our tented non heated cabins. It was pretty cold and we were hungry thankfully we had packed food from Madras cafe and all of us literally jumped on the food. After that we headed into the main dining area where there was a grand fireplace and comfortable couches around it and we proceeded to laze around a bit and warm our cold bodies. After some time we decided to hit the bed and thats when the fun started. None of realized how cold one can feel in a non heated cabin till we started tucking ourselves in and realized the blankets were damp and the cold was literally seeping in and despite wearing jackets etc we were freezing. Fast forward 30 minutes and we decided we need dry blankets and a trip to the reception was needed. Me/Raghav/Sudhir headed to the reception and got a bunch of dry blankets. Well as it happens even dry blankets didnt help as the night proceeded the dew settled onto the blankets inside the tented cabins and we suffered a cold damp night despite wearing multiple layers of clothing. By morning all of us had hardly slept and we decided unless we could get an upgrade to a heated cabin we would head back home rather than sleep another day like this. Luckily we got heated cabins later in the morning and we decided to head out to toulumne meadows and tioga pass and time permitting further into the sierra nevada. I must say it was one heck of a beautiful drive. We started with heading out towards toulumne meadows and saw some very very beautiful sights along the way. We hit toulumne meadows by noon or so. The meadows look pretty though I hear during spring it looks amazing when the plants here flower for a short time. We spent some time hiking around and climbing up the small hilltop in the meadows. Its a beautiful place and the views from there are just amazing. After Toulumne meadows we decided to drive upto to tioga pass and beyond into the Sierra Nevada. I am so happy we decided to do that ... As we drove past tioga we came across a frozen lake and much fun was had at the banks of the lake playing on the ice. After the lake we drove up a little more into the sierra nevada and saw some sights like the following before we decided to turn back and head to the valley. Someday we hope to do a drive down the Sierra nevada. It has some of the most amazing sights. The next day was a drive upto glacier point for breathtaking views of the valley and Half dome. We spent a good amount of time there taking snaps from various angles before heading out. A couple of snaps of the famous Ahawanee hotel one from right next to the hotel and the other as seen from glacier point. Next stop was Mariposa grove near wawona. The grove has about 500 Giant Sequoias these are the largest living things on the planet and can live for about 3200 years. The trees just look fantastic and are about as huge as a small trailer at the base. A few snaps of the sequoias to give a perspective :) This last snap was Aruna's idea and it cleary gives one an idea of the size of these trees. Spot us if you can:). Overall a really wonderful and amazing trip. We got to see more of the beautiful Yosemite National park but a lot more remains to be seen. Next trip shall be in early spring/summer to see the falls in full flow and the tuolumne meadows.

Happy Diwali Everyone!

2007-11-08T04:35:03Z

Wishing all of you a very Happy Diwali from our side! My wife made some super badam burfi and now its payasam time tomorrow ! We even had some nice baby corn manchurian which my wife made in the evening.. We managed to get a few decorative lights and have put it up in the patio and it looks very pretty. Once again Wishing you all a very happy diwali!

Big Sur Drive

2007-11-01T07:39:35Z

A couple of weeks back we went on a long drive down south towards Big Sur. It was one heck of a drive with beautiful views all along the CA-1. I tried to capture some good snaps and you can get them here . I am skipping on the description and you can find that on my wife's blog . Also in other news the bay area was hit by a quake of the magnitude of 5.6 on Richter scale yesterday and a 3.7 quake today. We felt both and it was I must say an interesting experience:).

Search for the Elusive Next Game To Play

2007-10-09T01:29:36Z

Its been over 6 months since I quit World of Warcraft and I am still to find a game that can hold my interest. A factor to contribute to it is also the fact that I have been mostly stuck with Ubuntu:) and no windows but still. Over the last 6 months I have been thinking of what made me play WOW for over 2 yrs whereas no other game in the past has ever managed to hold my interest for so long. I have played various RPG's and even bought guild wars about the same time as I bought WOW. But my guild wars copy has hardly been played heck I still have my guild wars and it runs under linux too ( via wine ) but somehow i still can't get myself to play it more than an hour before I get bored of it. What I have realized is - Wow was fun. Questing in wow/guilds/pvp everything about the game was fun. Heck even farming/finding friends to quest with everything about the game rocked. What wow got right was the community features in the game. Guild wars chat channel is crappy no linking/no auction house/no in game e-mail etc makes the game rather boring. - Wow had all the features superbly implemented. More importantly the cities were superb hubs to hang around, the characters had well Character..Guild wars characters look lame...all human is so boring! The mobs in WOW were fun, its certainly fun to kill a 2 headed Ogre than a stupid scorpion or something named Charr or a centaur all of them making the same sounds. - The regions were gorgeous, the shared world was amazing... running around in stranglethorn vale randomly running into enemy faction characters and deciding whether to be nice or gank the guy had a rush of its own or not knowing if you were the one going to get ganked. - Essentially I am still to find another game that had the capability to involve a player so much as WOW did. I guess thats why its also known as World of Wowcrack! Enough about wow now to the new games to look forward to! - Warhammer Online - Now this seems to be similarly themed like Wow but with a more balanced PVP system than WOW. It has a similar setting with shared worlds/realm vs realm combat etc. It remains to be seen if Warhammer will better WOW. - Tabula Rasa - From the creator of the Ultima Online comes a scifi MMORPG. Its an RPG set in the far future where humans are involved in fighting a war that has lasted for a long long time against a merciless enemy called the Bane. I played the beta a bit though on my crappy laptop and with bad shader support everything was like grey:p. But from the little bit I played the game play didnt seem extraordinary. The screenshots look beautiful but I am not very impressed by the gameplay. Also PVP at this moment is only by consensus that kind of makes the world rather uninteresting for me. Hellgate London- This is an interesting game coming from the creators of Diablo. For the people who like Gothic Horror Games this would be the best one. It has 6 different classes plays similar to Guildwars where everything is instanced and has a character advancement model similar to Diablo. The only thing that kind of put me off from this game is that its all interior and mostly cityscape as the game storyline is built around London. I don't like playing closed space games for various reasons. Now onto the other NON RPG genre that I really like and have been looking for a game to play since Warcraft 3. - Supreme Commander: From the legendary creator of Total Annihilation one of the best RTS games ever comes this beauty. Supreme Commander launched in Feb 2007 and has got rave reviews. The problem its a beast and needs a beast of a machine to run^. Hopefully with my flash new card I should be able to get it to run once I get windows:) - Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance - Coming this November 2007 is a standalone expansion to Supreme Commander which introduces a new playable race the Seraphim. The AI is supposedly much improved and all the factions are getting new playable units. This would be an interesting game to watch for. - Universe at War - Similar to Supreme Commander except the game is set on Earth with 3 different funky looking factions. The number of units per faction are less but have a lot of variety and look absolutely gorgeous. The thing that interests me in this game is the Novus faction which has the ability to teleport units around and plays very differently from the other 2 factions. Also the interesting fact in this game is that everything is a resource unlike having specific resource nodes this game allows you to harvest anything and everything in the game for resources. - World in Conflict - I haven't seen much of this game but it seems to take the concepts of an older game Ground Control 2 and improved upon it. No resources to be harvested but you get more units via a reinforcement model. Over the next few months I hope to try out a couple of the ones listed above at least one of the Supreme Commander ones or Universe at war. Lets see if RTS genre has improved from Warcraft 3 times and is worth revisiting.

San Diego

2007-10-03T21:48:12Z

Back in San diego within a month but this time on work!. Will be here till tomorrow and will try to upload a couple of snaps of the yahoo musicmatch office!. The office is in like this beautiful spanish villa. First look at the office and I was like "wth! this is like a resort ". Snaps coming soon!

ken rockwell ( aka chuck norris of photography)

2007-09-26T19:02:36Z

A forward I came across on bangaloreshutterbugs rather hilarious:) more behind the cut. * Ken Rockwell is the Chuck Norris of photography * Ken Rockwell's camera has similar settings to ours, except his are: P[erfect] Av[Awesome Priority Tv[Totally Awesome Priority] M[ajestic] * Ken Rockwell doesn't color correct. He adjusts your world to match his. * Sure, Ken Rockwell deletes a bad photo or two. Other people call these Pulitzers. * Ken Rockwell doesn't adjust his DOF, he changes space-time. * Circle of confusion? You might be confused. Ken Rockwell never is. * Ken Rockwell doesn't wait for the light when he shoots a landscape - the light waits for him. * Ken Rockwell never flips his camera in portrait position, he flips the earth * Ken Rockwell ordered an L-lens from Nikon, and got one. * Ken Rockwell is the only person to have photographed Jesus; unfortunately he ran out of film and had to use a piece of cloth instead. * When Ken Rockwell brackets a shot, the three versions of the photo win first place in three different categories * Before Nikon or Canon releases a camera they go to Ken and they ask him to test them, the best cameras get a Nikon sticker and the less good get a Canon sticker * Once Ken tested a camera, he said I cant even put Canon on this one,thats how Pentax was born * Rockwellian policy isn't doublethink - Ken doesn't even need to think once * Ken Rockwell doesn't use flash ever since the Nagasaki incident. * Only Ken Rockwell can take pictures of Ken Rockwell; everyone else would just get their film overexposed by the light of his genius * Ken Rockwell wanted something to distract the lesser photographers, and lo, there were ducks. * Ken Rockwell is the only one who can take self-portraits of you * Ken Rockwell's nudes were fully clothed at the time of exposure * Ken Rockwell once designed a zoom lens. You know it as the Hubble SpaceTelescope. * When Ken unpacks his CF card, it already has masterpieces on it. * Rockwell portraits are so lifelike, they have to pay taxes * On Ken Rockwell's desktop, the Trash Icon is really a link to National Geographic Magazine * Ken Rockwell spells point-and-shoot "h-a-s-s-e-l- b-l-a-d" * When Ken Rockwell went digital, National Geographic nearly went out of business because he was no longer phyically discarding photos * For every 10 shots that Ken Rockwell takes, 11 are keepers. * Ken Rockwell's digital files consist of 0's, 1's AND 2's. * Ken Rockwell never focus, everything moves into his DoF * Ken Rockwell's shots are so perfect, Adobe redesigned photoshop for him: all it consists of is a close button. * The term tripod was coined after his silhouette * Ken Rockwell never produces awful work, only work too advanced for the viewer * A certain braind of hig-end cameras was named after people noticed the quality was a lot "like a" rockwell * Ken Rockwell isn't the Chuck Norris of photography; Chuck Norris is the Ken Rockwell of martial arts. * Ken Rockwell never starts, he continues

A life update:)

2007-09-25T16:52:07Z

Yea I have been lazy to update this blog. Quite a few things happened over the last couple of weeks.. We went to a wine and art festival here in Santa clara (nothing extraordinary) and a few snaps that I took at the festival can be seen here. Also while trying to install my new motherboard/graphics card I managed to slice my finger badly which converted me into a one hand typist for a week or so and still a 9 finger typist. Will take a couple more days before my finger heals fully!. In the meanwhile I am being pampered and spoilt by my wife:)). But I did manage to get the motherboard/graphics card installed and now I have a brand new flashy ATI 2600 XT 512 MB graphics card on my machine. But the reward for the effort of building a new box( playing Supreme Commander) will have to wait as I am still trying to get a cheap copy of windows:)...I am not willing to pay 200$ for Windows! especially when ubuntu works for almost everything else that I do and is free!. The only reason to use windows for me is to play games:p and use the damn webcam as enabling video4linux requires a kernel rebuild which I am lazy to do. But in the meantime, I have explored a lot of linux gaming options and may I say linux as a platform is ready! its the damn game developers who need to get their act together and release linux clients. Guild Wars runs smoothly under wine except for the fact that it has to be run in DirectX8 mode and with no shaders. The other free games that I explored include Regnum Online , Planeshift and recently Savage: The battle for Newerth. The problem with all the free games is as always content. Technologically they are close to commercial games but the gameplay gets boring really fast due to lack of interesting content. As a result I am just going to play a bit of Guildwars till I can get a windows license. On the War of the cubes:) I haven't made much progress. I need to get back to it and now that my new box is ready and I still don't have any games to play so its time to get back to development. Also I have been meaning to process more of our San Diego trip pictures and hopefully I will get around to it now and upload more of them. Thats about it for now! hopefully I will update this blog soon with some War of the cubes news:)

San Diego Trip

2007-09-07T00:59:28Z

All i will say is it was an amazing trip :) We had a blast and I managed to get some nice snaps:) For details and snaps read my wife's blog :)

War of the cubes:update

2007-08-27T20:01:29Z

Over the last week I have been busy trying to integrate a few more things into the game. I am happy that I have managed to now integrate ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) into my game and now the cubes obey the laws of physics! They fall more realistically, handle collisions and also orient themselves correctly along the terrain. Further I have also done some internal cleanups to allow me to use level definition files to load/unload levels dynamically. I will upload a few more screenshots later which show collision handling and physics in action. The next stage is going to be writing an unit loader allowing me to describe physical attributes of objects in config files and later to see how I can make the whole thing scriptable. Essentially providing hooks into the unit AI's via Lua or python. This would allow me to expand Simutron AI without having to constantly recompile the game source code and also allow me to model complex AI behaviour and test it out in realtime.

War of the cubes : Code

2007-08-22T19:38:57Z

I think i have reached a point at which the basic infrastructure in the code base is relatively stable. I now manage the code in a local SVN repository and here's a first snapshot of the code base. Things you will need to build this - Ogre 1.4 - OIS 1.0RC - CEGUI 0.5 - libconfig http://www.hyperrealm.com/main.php?s=libconfig - State Threads 1.8 http://state-threads.sourceforge.net/ How to run the program ---------------------------------- - make - ./TerrainRenderer - Right click on the terrain to create cubes. camera movement using keyboard keys shift+up/down to lookup and down, shift+left/right to strafe. - Hit ESC to get rid of the main menu which doesnt do anything right now anyway:p - create around 50-100 cubes and just watch them kill/clone and commit suicide. - They output a lot of text to stdout which i use for debugging for now you can probably /dev/null it. Known bugs:) -------------------- - sometimes clicking on the terrain doesnt create a cube, this is due to the way I am doing raycasting to figure out if the click lands on a terrain. I am in the process of fixing it this usually happens if the camera is beyond the dimensions of the terrain. - cubes dont follow terrain strictly , this is due to me adding +3 to the cube's y position and i think some LOD issues. - GUI buttons don't do anything yet:p NOW the code: Download file and a few screenshots

War of the cubes:Update Warning Long Post!

2007-08-20T19:12:20Z

CREATED ->ACTIVE -> DEAD->DESTROYED -CREATED - The simutron is growing to life and won't process any events in this state( useful or doing a creation animation) -ACTIVE - Simutron is ready and will process events now as well as fire off events based on certain conditions being met. -SLUMBERING (not shown will update diagram later)- Simutron will process incoming events but will not trigger any events by itself nor do any checks. Its like a sleep state for the simutron. -DEAD - Simutron is dead and will not process any more events. Useful to start playing a death animation. -DESTROYED- Simutron is done dying! release all resources now. I will expand this state machine as the game develops but for now its sufficient. Now the code I have implemented allows me to just add a seed population of simutrons and just watch them kill/clone other simutrons. As of now I have the flexibility to easily change the simulation logic and try out different simulations. The current simulation is a variant of Conway's Game of Life but there are a few bugs I need to fix with it:) Mainly, the creation rate of simutrons is far higher than their death rate leading to a few thousand of them on screen and bringing the simulation to a halt! What I would like to achieve is a stable population of simutrons using simple rules. Screenshots/video to come! ]]> The next thing I am planning on doing is to setup a Master controlling AI and let it spawn GroupLeader AI's which in turn will control individual simutrons. The idea is to simulate flocking behaviours/self organizing groups etc. How this will work will be each simutron will start off directly being controlled by Master AI. At any time when 3-4 simutrons come close to each other they will randomly promote one simutron as a group leader and join that group. Then the movement of the GroupLeader will determine individual simutron movements. The Group will keep adding more simutrons to itself till it reaches a certain group size. The loners who don't join a group for a long time will die off leaving only groups moving about. Once this stage is reached we can simulate group to group interactions and more complex behaviour can be modelled. Later on I will add other AITypes controlled by Master AI which inturn will control group AI's. These AITypes will have different types of priorities eg, Building, War , Reconnaissance etc. The master AI will use these AITypes to shift priorities and assign/take away simutrons from AITypes. Essentially this will be a resource optimization problem for each AI. Given different competing objectives how to optimize resource allocation and usage. Eg The master AI at any time has X number of simutrons available to it and different tasks to complete like building/fighting/reconnaissance etc. Depending on what state the simulation is in it will have to dynamically reassign simutrons between AITypes. Similalry each AIType will have multiple objectives and limited number of groups/simutrons under its control and will have to prioritize based on available resources. The AI development will be a long continuous process which I will be doing alongwith the other significant integration which is Physics. I intend to integrate a physics engine (either bullet or Ode) into the simulation to handle stuff like collision detection and a more realistic behaviour of simutrons. At some point I hope to make this into a simulation framework by integrating a scripting language to control the simulation. Note To Self: Should commit code to some code versioning system:)

War of the Cubes!

2007-08-14T18:30:00Z

Mostly a game dev rant and a collection of my thoughts on dealing with some Game Dev issues :) My previous post talked about how I intended to start writing a game and use that to explore different aspect of game development. Over the last two weeks I have spent quite a bit of time coding. The focus of the program has been to develop the basic framework for a game/simulation. I can say that I am 15% there now:p. What do I have in place, - Integration with CEGUI for GUI elements, - Integration with OIS for handling events from keyboard/mouse ( sorry no joystick support:p) - Integration with State Threads for unit AI. The first two are fairly standard stuff and was mostly figuring out the API calls etc. The game isnt much right now it just loads up a terrain and allows you to use a free look camera to explore the terrain. The camera can't roll though for obvious reasons as its not a flight simulator that I am designing. Also I dont allow the camera to go below the terrain again for obvious reason, but I am yet to limit it on the sides which I will do soon. I decided that I wanted to write some kind of simulation/strategy game. One thing I have always wondered is how does one control a few thousand entities on screen at the same time and I thought this will be a good chance to understand a bit about AI programming. Most games can be modelled as glorified state machines, with each unit in the game running its own little state machine. The only difference between a game and a simulation is the human input which allows modification of simulated behaviour. Now instead of modelling each entity's state machine and running through them in a loop every step, I thought why not try something different. Enter StateThreads :) StateThread library is a user level threading library which implements a cooperative threading model. Since its cooperative there is no need for mutexes etc and each thread is very light weight with a small stack allowing you to create thousands of such threads at any time. In the game I decided I will model each state machine as a separate state thread and every timestep just let each thread run to update its state. The only problem though is that the main thread needs to schedule each thread in sequence as each thread needs to yield control for any other thread to run. As a result i implemented a 2 state run method for each thread ( runnable/wait Queue). Each child thread will be in one of these states, if its in runnable , the main thread will schedule it for running. Once a thread completes its iteration it will move to a WaitQueue state. Once each of the runnable threads are done running the main thread broadcasts a condition variable to indicate movement of all waitQueue threads back to runnable status, where they again block on a condition variable waiting for the main thread to yield control to them. Implementing this took a bit of time mainly due to me using a 3 state system earlier with the thread explicitly signalling to the main thread but for some reason the main thread was never getting the signal and both the threads would block indefinetly. Now the main thread signals a runnable thread and yields control by calling st_usleep(0) immediately after the signal. This works beautifully. Now I am able to create a few hundred entities without much perceivable slow down in frame rates. I am still doing a healthy 125 fps or more on my really old nvidia GF4 Ti4200. What I feel about this system is that it allows me great flexibility in designing game AI. Imagine a typical situation of giving orders to an unit. Now with each unit I can now assign a Priority Queue which works like a command queue. All commands to the Unit are queued to it and when the thread gets a chance to run it runs through the commands as fast as possible. Now since its a priority Queue we can handle like User commands higher than AI instructions or vice versa or even assign individual events higher priority. Like if it gets a user command as well as a DIE instruction because the AI computed that this unit is dead due to an attack, then probably we should probably ignore the user command as it may change the state of the unit to a situation where it doesn't die making the AI command completly invalid cause if dont' ignore the AI command the user will see the bullet miss the unit but the unit still dies! But if all these events are processed in the same frame probably it won't matter. Further this also allows units to be grouped very easily. When a bunch of units are grouped we can just create another thread which manages all the grouped entities. The individual AI threads for the units will just look if the unit is currently grouped and can disable certain local decision making and give priority to the group decision making. When the unit is then given a new instruction we can detach it from the group and send it out on its own and at the end of the assignment rejoin the unit to the group. This allows a myriad possibilities in better group AI. Imagine forming a group out of different kind of units like siege weapons, infantry, mechanized infantry and tanks. Now the group AI can acquire targets and send individual units against different kinds of targets. These units will run individually for some time and at the end of the assignment rejoin the group AI thread as available. Group threads themselves can be group controlled by our Master AI thread. This kind of a model I feel will lead to a significantly stronger AI than what most computer games have today. The challenge though in game AI is not the modelling but also the decision making that needs to happen in very short time intervals. I am not sure if I will be able to achieve it but its a good starting point!. I probably will also release the code as a simulation framework allowing people to design their own simulations by just coding the Unit AI/Group AI and watch their simulation unfold.