Loinhead

Sam’s just blogged that he and Woody will be at the Penny Arcade Expo PAX this year, to demo Fable 2. They might be filling those ‘TBA’ slots in the Microsoft schedule! Considering that Lionhead did not have a new Fable II build for the GC at Leipzig, this could still be the E3 version of the game. Anyone going?

From an anonymous source and AI Game Programming Wisdom comes this article, entitled Varieties of Learning, on the approach taken for Creature AI in B&W. It is written by Richard Evans, who was at the time in charge of the AI system for the creature (and has now moved on to work on Sims 3). It talks about decision trees, perceptrons, learning methods and feedback implementations, so this article is of special interest to those interested in AI. The book AI Wisdom is a collection of such articles and well worth checking out.

Although Richard Evans is gone, this is also the technology that powers the dog and probably more, as an article on Fable 2 AI explained last year.

Also, our competition is still running. If you don’t have a valid mailing address, get one quick!

From Leipzig (shamefully overdue) come these delicious screenshots. You can still get that free copy of Fable, just by posting on the forums. (register / log in)

From kvikshaug (aka murr4y on #lionhead @ quakenet) comes this great snapshot of Lionhead at work, using their webcams and running through it at high speed. There’s more details here; the original’s here, and to play it, just right-click and choose Play!

Loinhead has a copy of original Fable, Xbox-style, that it would like to give away. There’s nothing special about this copy … unless you consider signed by Peter Molyneux special. Still in its original packaging. Touched by at least three other members of the Lionhead team!

To enter, all you need is a

• valid postal address

that can be

• anywhere in the world.

All you need to do to win is

• post on the Loinhead forums

within the next week! And all you need for that is to

• log in (password recover) or register.

Every day that you make a post increases your chances of winning! And it looks like, right now, your chances of winning are close to 100% 50%.

Via Project Ego comes this Gameplay video from the Leipzig GDC. It claims to include a minute of co-op, five minutes of childhood co-op and minor spoilers. Available on Gametrailers.

Despite their refusal to be drawn out by us, Lionnose have scored an interview with Felix Petzel, head PR guy for Entertainment & Devices of Microsoft’s German division. (Unfortunately, all the actual Lionhead guys were too busy to talk to them.)

Petzel, pictured left, could tell Lionnose in an exclusive interview at the Games Convention in Leipzig that the Games Convention in Leipzig is really pretty great, that Fable 2 is great, that fans won’t enjoy Fable 2 unless they get a cold drink, German fans don’t get any cool “pre-sell” stuff, and he can’t comment on the pub games exploits. He does go on to say that Fable 2 is really, really, really going to be great.

Lionose’s article is in German, but Google has a translation.

The first reason to come to mind is that we’re whores.

Comments!

To the 1,236 of you who dared turn up here with IE6: You’re screwed. You will remain screwed.

From the gallery of the artist (Matthew Allsopp) who gave us Dark Entrance, we have a troll encounter and, entirely unrelatedly, this second image from his gallery is entitled only Project X (coincidentally, that’s what Lionhead have sometimes called their secret game).

Lionnose picked up on this post and consider it significant. They linked to Loins, which is cool, but they referred to us as “their colleagues” at Loins.

HOW ABOUT “THEIR SUPERIORS” AT LOINS, BITCHES

GameDaily.com has a user-submitted interview with Peter, mostly about him as a person and the ideas behind Fable 2.