swordsmanluke @ swordsmanluke @programming.dev

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Joined

2 yr. ago

If you liked FO3 you'll like 4.

It's a lot stronger mechanically than 3 or NV - shooting is a lot less janky and the gun customization adds some great emergent quests.

The Boston of FO4 has its moments - a certain duck pond stands out to me in particular - but aside from Nick Valentine the questlines are largely forgettable.

Still, the core game loop is a lot of fun - go here, blow stuff up, scavenge bits to upgrade your stuff.

As a longtime Fallout fan (came for the isometric apocalypse, stayed for the 3D googie architecture) I still put 80 hours into FO4.

It's a good fuckin' game. It's just competing with the legacy of a lot of other great games in the series.

This is why I loved thee Demon's Souls approach - single player game with crowd sourced miniboss AI.

If you haven't played it already - Inscryption - by the same author - is also really good.

... and I should lay off the emdash for the rest of the night.

And it's currently $5.00 on steam. You know, if you're price shopping.

Experience.

One of the best programmers I worked with was a hunt and peck typist.

His code was meticulous. I frequently learned things reading his PRs.

Pair programming with him otoh....

So... unlike Stable Diffusion or LLMs, the point of this research isn't actually to generate a direct analog to the input, in this case video games. It's testing to see if a generative model can encode the concepts of an interactive environment.

Games in general have long been used in AI research because they are models of some aspect of reality. In this case, the researchers want to see if a generative AI can learn to predict the environment just by watching things happen. You know, like real brains do.

E.g. can we train something that learns the rules of reality just by watching video combined with "input signals". If so, it opens up whole new methods for training robots to interact with the real world.

That's why this is newsworthy beyond just "AI Buzz" cycle.

Amazing.

I'm just starting to learn how language development works and like... of any language to try implementing, Haskell definitely seems like one of the most complex.

Like - one dev could reasonably implement a Forth or Lisp, but you need a long time window to finish a Haskell...

You don't have enough zucchini markers.

Hmm. How many kilos do you have? It doesn't really matter how much zucchini you plant - you will need at least three times as many markers as you think.

Fascinating.

I'm a minor programming language nerd. While I'd never recommend writing an in house language - I can see the appeal for me personally.

What were the languages like? OOP? FP? ...Logic?

Why'd they build 2 languages?

This seems so wild to me - sorry if I'm prying.

Well - I played both and I quite enjoyed Heaven's Vault as well.

I played HV through twice - once for the story and then a second time to see how far I could alter that story with different choices. My wife even played a third time to try for a really particular set of events.

The translation game in HV goes much harder than Chants'. After the first playthrough, you get longer and more challenging texts to decipher.

Also - there's no backtracking really required. The game is pretty strict about telling you where you can and cannot go and reacting to what you found or didn't find. You can cut whole plot lines in HV and it's no problem.

Which makes it one of the better games for replayablity in my mind.

It is - for sure - slow paced. Almost meditative.

Oh man - I loved WRoEF, but the bathtub segment has ensured I can never play it again.

Ugh - this game!

I loved it. The mechanics of The Scene is still one of the most amazing bits of storytelling I've seen in a video game. I think about it frequently when I'm considering how video games can tell stories in ways that movies or books just can't.

The game as a whole is good, but a little uneven IMO. But I'd put that scene up there with Braid for the sheer impact of storytelling-via-videogame-mechanics.

If you don't already know.. the "corrupt" text in the terminals is where a lot of the semi-secret story clues are - especially in the beginning. If you want to know how to read it, lemme know and I'll tell you what you need. Otherwise, no spoilers.

That said, the puzzles in the game are pretty consistent throughout, so if solving 3d spatial arrangements of laser beams isn't fun for you - it's not gonna get any better.

Also... A big part of playing Death Loop was figuring out the proper order to kill everybody. ... and sadly, there's only one order that will work. So once you know the order, a big part of the challenge is eliminated.

It would have been really cool if the game selected a random ordering for your character at new game start and each target's vulnerable timing changes accordingly. Something similar to how some of Dishonored's missions could have multiple solutions.

... but I get why they didn't. Dishonored had mission variants just switch up some text which is relatively cheap compared to having fully different behaviors and speech and so on that would need to be created just for the tiny set of players that not only finish but replay a game.

As someone who played through Dishonored 1,2 and all their respective DLCs multiple times, I was sad that Death Loop didn't have the same level of repayablity baked into the overarching structure, but I still quite enjoyed the game itself. I just finished it once and moved on.

To be horribly pedantic... Not necessarily!

It could be Apple users -> Windows users -> Linux users -- with larger numbers of Apple -> Windows conversions than Windows -> Linux conversions...

You know.

Maybe.

Nah. AI-generated content doesn't "ruin" the internet any more than Disney can "ruin" Star Wars.

The good stuff is still there. Always has been. Low effort Sora vids don't reduce the entertainment value of - say - Tom Scott's oeuvre.

What AI spam does its the same thing all spam has ever done - increases the amount of noise we have to filter.

Noise is always cheaper to manufacture than signal so it always appears to dominate. ... but any given noise has no lasting commercial value, while high quality signal always does. That's why the old newspaper companies are still around even when you can just read Twitter to get the gist of world events.

Intelligence and thoughtful design matter.

We're gonna see a lot of AI spam for a couple years. But I promise you someone is already working hard to figure out how to identify it.

When I first joined the internet it was considered virtually impossible to detect and block spam reliably. Now, email spam is a rare annoyance that only impacts us occasionally.

Someone will crack AI-detection, or better yet, solve "this is noise" detection once and for all.

Listen here, you little shit--

OK, so we should all just start prefixing every comment with marker meme text for the bots to learn (and humans to filter out). The bots pick up some truly weird patterns and go insane.

More insidiously, have an LLM rephrase all comments between posting and display. Looks human-enough, should still contain our salient points - and plays merry hell with future training efforts.

Matt Foley was a Life Coach. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xv2VIEY9-A8

(This is not an idiom, just something I realized as a parent.) Sometimes, being an adult means "reaching into the shit."

Shit has to be dealt with. My kids - as babies - could not deal with their own shit. It was my job and responsibility as their parent to clean up that shit. And sometimes something would get dropped in the shit. And you gotta reach in.

Nobody likes dealing with shit. Everyone tries to take as little shit as they can. But some days, no matter how I feel - it's on me to reach into the shit.