Fa?ade is a prototype of interactive drama, a new genre of character and story-intensive interactive entertainment. Fa?ade is freely downloadable at interactivestory.net. In Fa?ade, you, the player, using your own name and gender, play the character of a longtime friend of Grace and Trip, an attractive and materially successful couple in their early thirties.

Fa?ade is an art/research project, that we're hoping will also serve as an example prototype for an interactive drama commercial product. We could charge money for it, but we'd rather make it easier to get Fa?ade to as many people as possible. We figure that if enough people play it and like the experience, we'll be in a position to make an even bigger and better interactive drama in the future, as an actual product.

Fa?ade was created over a period of 5 years primarily by two collaborators, Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern. We are each designer-programmers focused on researching and developing artificially intelligent art and entertainment. The production was an almost entirely self-funded, industry-academia collaboration: Andrew has 10+ years of game industry experience as a designer and AI engineer, and Michael creates AI-based art and is an Assistant Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Can you see the problem? It is in a category all by itself, and that makes it hard to describe to people enough to make them want to read it. So figure out the way that makes the most sense and tell people to get a copy today!

It's now 167MB, instead of the original 800MB! Thanks to speex.org for the better audio compression. (The Mac version is 131MB because Macs are guaranteed to come with Java, so we didn't need to include it in the installer.) The 1.6GHz CPU restriction is now turned off - although Fa?ade will still run poorly, or not at all, on computers slower than a 1.6GHz Pentium 4. Fa?ade version 1.1 for Windows was released February 16, 2006. Version 1.0 for Windows was released July 5, 2005.

Over time, parts or all of the Fa?ade technology will become available for others to use for their own art, research or industry projects. We have formed a studio called Procedural Arts to own and distribute Fa?ade and its technology. See our technology page.

The FIG is a grant through the Community Development Block Grant program which is funded through the Housing and Urban Development Department. The grant assists downtown property owners with minor restorations and encourages historic preservation practices.

Lights in the Sky & Little Green Men: A Rational Christian Look at UFOs and Extraterrestrials, by Hugh Ross, Kenneth Samples, and Mark Clark (NavPress) Body Snatchers in the Desert: The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story, by Nick Redfern (Paraview-Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, 2005) Back to Top Here's Mike: The short answer is that I think they're evil and I only really cares to read credentialed academics who have worked in the field.

Glass fa?ade testing is a process wherein the fa?ade is tested for its designed performance for Structural stability & leakage's against air & water infiltration. These tests are a must & should be performed on every project as no two projects are similar & this helps the Project Manager to act proactively, thus save Valuable material in the form of modification, Valuable time & Valuable Money.