Adalast
@Adalast@lemmy.world
- Comment on Marvels Rivals requires creators to sign a contract that removes your right to give a negative review to access the playtest 6 days ago:
I saw that line and immediately thought “oh ho ho, we have a loophole. This wasn’t a subjective review, it was entirely objective. The game is objectively shit.”
- Comment on Speed 1 week ago:
Yeah, those rides complete a rotation in ~10 seconds given what I was able to count in a couple YouTube videos, so 36°/sec. If they have a 10m radius, the linear velocity would be 6.283 m/s or 22.62km/he.
- Comment on Experiments 1 week ago:
Geez, it’s like nobody has ever played Spore.
- Comment on Take-Two Interactive shuts down the Studios behind Kerbal Space Program and Rollerdrome 2 weeks ago:
As far as I’m concerned the inclusion of the “anti-DoTA” clause in their EULA murdered it for me. I was so excited. KSP is one of my favorite games of all times, largely as a result of the vibrant and very technically advanced modding community. Same goes for essentially all of my favorites; Rimworld, Backpack Hero, Factorio. The free labor that expands the games in major ways extends the value of my money and let’s me have fun forever in them.
Putting in a clause in a EULA which automatically and irrevocably assumes all ownership and rights to any code or assets that are created for a game is just too far. Assuming rights at all is a huge issue for me, but I can accept that it is beneficial to assume royalty free licenses to the mods, I’ll even begrudgingly accept clauses that allow developers to gaffle features and optimizations from mods without giving remuneration or even acknowledgment. But wholesale ownership that revokes all rights and licenses for the independent 3rd party creator. Fuck that. I will never support a game that I find out is treating the people who keep games alive and relevant for decades for free like that.
- Comment on Explain yourselves, comp sci. 2 weeks ago:
As a mathematician this genuinely hurts. Lol.
- Comment on Or we could do metric time 4 weeks ago:
Sometimes I really hate the modern world. Especially working remotely doing what could be asynchronous work with colleagues, why the hell can’t we just sleep whenever we want, as long as the work gets done.
- Comment on Or we could do metric time 4 weeks ago:
Yeah, I noticed my rythem in absence of anything teathering it to the socially acceptable world is about 28 hours. Weird that I am not alone in this apparently.
- Comment on Or we could do metric time 4 weeks ago:
I have genuinely had exactly this conversation with only the names changed. Multiple times.
- Comment on Or we could do metric time 4 weeks ago:
I actually had this happen once. My mental health actually improved, but it was untenable for my job and social life unfortunately. It was kinda nice for a couple months though.
- Comment on can you help me formulate an answer to a colleague who is not my boss but feels entitled to tell me how I have to work? 4 weeks ago:
www.pinterest.com/pin/794815034214740333/ Perhaps something here can help.
- Comment on Have you ever seen coal in real life? 1 month ago:
My father runs live steam engines.
- Comment on Nintendo Switch emulator suyu continues on from yuzu - first release is up 1 month ago:
This is precisely what happened with Cockatrice. Happy to see it. Fuck them for their shit. Hasbro and WoTC couldn’t stop FOSS, Nintendo won’t either. There will be an iteration soon that steps just far enough away from Nintendo IP that they aren’t able to say shit anymore.
- Comment on Why does the film press talk so much about box office income? 2 months ago:
Fun exercise… Look at the opening weekend box office numbers and figure out what 90% of it is. That is what the distributor made from the movie for THAT WEEKEND. They will continue to make 90% for at least a week. After that it will drop some. Eventually the theater will actually get the lion’s share of the box office, something like 6-8 weeks after the movie comes out. Do your local theaters a favor, don’t go see movies opening weekend, call the box office each week to find out what movies will be leaving that week and go see it then. Or, if you absolutely feel the need to go see it opening weekend, budget for the largest popcorn and drink you can afford. They are the highest profit margin items on the menu. The tickets may cost 30-45 bucks for a date night, but the theater only sees $3-$4.5 of that at the top end, even less for more anticipated movies. That is why concessions are so expensive, it is literally the only way they can stay afloat and Disney has even tried demanding 50% of opening weekend concessions for some movies.
This is why so many cinemas are failing, both chains and locals. Spread the word, share this info, save our silver screens and send a message to the big media companies that they are being too greedy.
- Comment on Square Enix’s president says it will be ‘aggressive in applying’ AI 4 months ago:
Ok, I’m done trying to educate you. You, by your own admission, are lay on literally every topic that you are speaking about and I am literally an expert. I have put in my thousand hours on modeling, animation, and VFX, as well as hundreds of hours on quest design for TTRPGs. I have a master’s degree in Animation and a bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics. I am professionally a developer and am actively designing AIs. Why the hell are you arguing with me on what is and is not possible? You know nothing but what you have read in a few pop-sci articles and blogs along with some observations from playing games. I have all of that too, plus everything else. Your opinions are based on incorrect assumptions that invalidate them from the start. If you can provide me a single scholarly article, published in a journal in the last 2 years that supports a single one of your assertions, I will yield on whatever you are able to support. Hell, I will even take a passage from a textbook on AI design published in the last year. I have already provided support for some of my assertions. Please provide some of yours. Again, scholarly publication. Not blog. Not pop-sci articles. A recent whitepaper from a research group is also acceptable.
- Comment on Steam keeps on winning 4 months ago:
The only reason I support them as a monopoly is because they are the closest thing to an ethical/moral capitalist company around. They are proof positive that treating employees, customers, and vendors fairly can lead to an obscenely strong company with profit margins that the amoral assholes out there looking for every way to shaft everyone to make an extra penny can are envious of.
From what I understand discussing the issue with friends who run game studios and deal with Valve/Steam, the employees pretty much have his mindset from the bottom to the top of the org chart. He has been smart in who he hires and who is promoted so leadership is not a bunch of sniveling money grubbers who will sell out immediately when he retires. 🤞
- Comment on Square Enix’s president says it will be ‘aggressive in applying’ AI 4 months ago:
Your response style is not rude. It is disingenuous confirmation hunting cherry picking. I addressed everything in your response in detail, but you latched on to the qualifiers and clarifications because those are the parts that satisfy your confirmation bias, even though in the full context they mean quite the opposite. I also am recognizing that you are not a dev, not a game designer, not an AI architect nor mathematician or computer scientist. All of this means that scope and breadth of your understanding of the topic you are attempting to belittle and demean is myopic at best. It is obvious that you do not understand what a “quest” in a game is nor what it takes to craft or write one. It is clear that you have 0 understanding of how LLM or AIs as a larger topic function or generate information. You deign to belittle the work that I am doing on this topic without asking a single question or clarifying a single detail from me. I’m sure you are getting a nosebleed for your perch on Mt. Dunning-Kruger. I can see you from my position on the adjacent slope. I will humor you though, since you seem to at least care about the topic, even though you seem utterly incapable of recognizing when something should be informative and educational.
What is a “quest” in a game: The abstract of this article covers some key concepts of both current anf potential future paradigms of quest design in video games. Currently qursts, even handcrafted ones, consist of a list of tasks.
- Comment on Square Enix’s president says it will be ‘aggressive in applying’ AI 4 months ago:
Are we close to generating an untextured room with a single untextured T-pose NPC? This is unnecessary. The environment and characters can all still be built and rigged using modern hand modeling and set design techniques. The get here would be the animations. All animations, and I mean all, are just a bunch of splines and interpolations in the engine. Curve fitting is something that AI’s have been getting trained to do for 50 years. It is a solved problem. What is not solved, and the reason we don’t see a ton of AI animation tools already is a lack of sufficiently large sample sets of good animations attached to a variety of rigs and a method of training the AI to be environmentally aware. I imagine the latter could be solved using computer vision techniques with virtual sensors like what is used for Crowds. It is actually a hypothetical problem that I am planning on tackling after my current project.
Or would it be using a language model to obfuscate using an RNG? This is almost insulting to the entire field of AI development, not to mention the mathematical fields of Probability Theory and Statistics. While AI models do function on Game Theory and Probability Theory models and are probabilistic, they are most definitely not any form of RNG. If you have that mindset, I suggest you do some more reading on the topics in scholarly publications or textbooks. Skip the pop-sci articles and blog posts.
As to your questions on timing, it may be this year, it may be 20 years. 2 years ago the idea of making photoreal images with AI was a pipe dream, then along comes Stable Diffusion and in less than 18 months we have gone from making passable images of a cat to an almost fully art-directable toolset capable of creating coherent videos. This is an amazing progressive leap and AIs in general have become more diverse because of it. It is a testament to just how fast something like this can grow given the right FOSS architecture and public interest. My guess is that it is closer to the 2 to 3-year range for a coherent world-building AI. That is not modeling, rigging, or animating, just the textual stuff. Story, relationships, lore, history, etc. My first tool I am trying to build is a world-building assistant for TTRPG GMs if that gives you a clearer picture of what I’m talking about.
Finally, the geometry generation times. You mention your experience, but I am struggling to pin down exactly what that entails for you. I mentioned using procedural modeling and having an AI that decides the parameters of the procedural when doing the modeling. In this setup the modeling is all mathematics and is done instantly. It can even include procedurally defined animations and affects that are able to be generated on the fly in microseconds. If you have 3D experience, I would suggest checking out Houdini ( www.sidefx.com ) to get a better grip on what is possible with proceduralism. They also have tools for doing rigging and animation that an AI could directly interface with, which can be utilized in game development realms as well as VFX.
- Comment on When people say that apps are stealing your data, what exactly does that mean? 4 months ago:
Yup. I love that I got my math degree, but it does give me an understanding of things like this that are usually miles ahead of my cohorts. It makes my skin crawl to see the kinds of things that these companies harvest. You mention restaurant QR codes. I’m sure not all of them are, but it is so easy to build harvesting APIs into websites that host those menus. I do the Analytics work for my company and the things that even just the basic analytics tag harvests, let alone setting up specialized eventing or more invasive APIs.
- Comment on When people say that apps are stealing your data, what exactly does that mean? 4 months ago:
It is even worse than that. Given the list of data you have provided it is actually possible to discern general activity. You can determine if you are playing video games, working out, watching TV, out on a date, hanging with friends. As long as your phone is in your possession, the patterns for every behavior have a distinct fingerprint for each person. With enough collection, they can be filtered and categorized.
Source: I am an analytical statistician.
- Comment on Square Enix’s president says it will be ‘aggressive in applying’ AI 4 months ago:
On your first point, no, an individual AI is not, and never will be, capable of doing all of those things. What is will be is an analog to how the human brain works. You don’t see, hear, move, and process the words of a conversation you have while walking down the street with a friend using the same pieces of the brain. The occipital lobe, auditory and locomotive sections of the somatosensory cortex, and language center of the prefrontal lobe handle the parts independently of each other, then the information is brought together and presented to your conscious mind. An AI-driven questing system would have multiple specialized AIs that worked together to generate it. So a model which analyzes the current state of the player to determine valid reward thresholds and quest objective difficulties, another one which maps the current world lore to make sure that the quest fits into the world state, another which fills in all of the dialog based on NPC background variables, then a final AI which is trained to look at the outputs of the others to resolve conflicts. Finally, an AI voice synthesis can round out the experience for players. All of those can run in parallel and can use quite a few metrics from player interaction as feedback for refining the training.
To your second point, most of the aspects of a quest are rather small and can be stored in memory. The rewards can get interesting. If they are a world object, procedural modeling can go a long way to making it so asset generation is not necessary. If it is perks or traits of some variety, this could be something generational which uses keyword detailing to create the parameters for the trait. Generation and storage of details and items are not really much of an issue.
As for the engine questions, all of them can process geometry, textures, and text from memory or new files on disk. If something needs to be compiled, then it can be compiled on the fly. Again, individual assets are pretty lightweight and would not require a lot of processessing.
Another speed-up would be to pregenerate details of the quests rather than attempting to do it all using a just-in-time implementation. The game could generate the parameters for the world for NPC’s in town when you load in, starting with the ones closest to the player position and progressively iterating over them in the direction of travel. All you need to do is have details ready for the “chat bot” portion of the interaction by the time the player is capable of reaching any given NPC. These are the boundaries of what is possible so not as heavy as generating the whole thing. Then the rest can be filled in while the player talks with them.
The biggest issue I see is continuity error hardening. Making sure that all of the NPC’s worlds are consistent with each other and nobody makes changes that break the world for other NPC’s. That is specifically what I am trying to work on.
- Comment on Square Enix’s president says it will be ‘aggressive in applying’ AI 4 months ago:
I am actually working on something for the quest generation problem. It is still in the experimental phases, so who knows if it will bear fruit, but don’t sell the concept short.
- Comment on Aliens decide to communicate with us 4 months ago:
I am pedantic to a fault, capable of simultaneously being the most specific and most vague person you will ever speak with, and have the social skills of a carrot. I am also debilitatingly ADHD, reasonably autistic, and more intelligent than is able to produce an emotionally functional adult.
I will leave it up to you all on if you want me to be the model, but I’d be happy to if it were up to me.
- Comment on It's dangerous to go alone. Take this. 5 months ago:
I’ll be careful. Keep things very local. That said, I cannot promise that I won’t create a pillar of negative mass curvature to enable instantaneous, non-inertial, light speed acceleration directly into the sun for specific humans.
- Comment on It's dangerous to go alone. Take this. 5 months ago:
I have always had the power fantasy of the superpower of “I can manipulate anything I can understand. The better, more nuanced, and more correct my understanding, the more fine and powerful my control.”
It is essentially an int stat demipotence. Obviously, I would never achieve omnipotence or omniscience, but it would be cool to just rewrite the laws of physics because I understand how they work normally.
Also, I know better than to ever touch the Hubble constant or vacuum energy state. It would be fun to do extremely local manipulation of the gravitational constant or maybe some of the Riemann curvature constants to adjust the local shape of spacetime.
- Comment on It's dangerous to go alone. Take this. 5 months ago:
Again, not all jobs are about money. I want something meaningful to occupy my non-lucky time. All being rich means for me is that I don’t have go suffer while I pursue it. It also affords me more time to focus on what I want to focus on and lead a much lower-stress life. I’m not looking to enrich someone with the job, but I would like to enrich the world.
- Comment on It's dangerous to go alone. Take this. 5 months ago:
- I specifically stated that “I apply to jobs I want”. Your statement indicates that you consider all work to be a waste of time. I personally want a job developing AI tools that work for the betterment of humanity. I wouldn’t need it to pay well as the investments I make on penny time would be my income. Also, it is one of those things that take too long to do in 12 hours, and having a team to work with helps a ton too.
- The trades aren’t taking 12 hours. If you had the golden touch, and intended on making trades that had long-term viability with 100% success, then an hour or two a month would be all you needed. This also makes sure that the growth is slow enough that the SEC doesn’t get alerted.
- I didn’t say I was going to take a walk to take a walk. I said I was walking around for a few hours to see what good fortune I could find. Again, if I have 100% successful luck, then everything I do is charmed. Walking “aimlessly” around most towns while under such an effect greatly increases the opportunities to happen across something that is beneficial.
- The limitation is that you mentioned at the end, the 12 hours every 2 weeks. There is only so much that can be done in that span of time. Everything I mentioned was specifically designed to expand the knock-on effects of the good luck into the rest of the time that I don’t have it. A stock portfolio with guaranteed long-term growth, research breakthroughs which need to be built upon by experimentation and work, meeting the right people and forming the right relationships in my community, a long-term employment that provides me the challenges and long-term results in the world. The biggest challenge is to make sure that you have a good life that makes a difference while you have your normal luck, not concentrating on short term success.
- Comment on It's dangerous to go alone. Take this. 5 months ago:
Au conteaire, money well spent does, in fact, buy time. If you are broke and have to spend half your day riding buses to get your errands done and you buy a car and can get them done in an hour or two, that is half a day you just bought. If you can hire a maid and a chef, that is all of the time that would have been spent cleaning and cooking that you now get to figure out how to spend. Don’t let anyone lie to you that money cannot buy time, because being able to use money to speed up tasks or offload them entirely is literally buying time.
- Comment on It's dangerous to go alone. Take this. 5 months ago:
Ok, the mask if you are actually rested and not just “feeling rested”. Being hit with the physical effects of sleep deprivation and having organs start failing after a couple weeks would be a real problem.
Otherwise, that damn penny. Knowing that I have 12 hours of “I win” without any real limitation, even if it ends up being 12 hrs/month, would be obscenely broken. None of the other artifacts even come close. I make sure I always flip on a Monday at about 8am, if it’s heads, I apply for jobs I want and trade some stocks until about 1 pm, then go for a walk and see what goodness I can fall into for my life. Head home around 6pm with 2 hours of perfect luck left which I spend working on the cure for Autoimmune diseases and Cancer. Once I have enough wealth built up and have found plenty of cures to Salk the hell our of to piss off the pharma companies, I start working on Nuclear Fusion. Continue this pattern until I get bored.
- Comment on it always interesting when multi billion dollar company's costing system is a 63 tab excel 97 spreadsheet at it's core... 5 months ago:
My boss used it for marketing control and CRM at one point. I put a stop to that real quick.
- Comment on gatekeeping 5 months ago:
I was thinking the same thing.