AeonFelis

joined 2 years ago
[–] AeonFelis@lemmy.world 35 points 16 hours ago

The big waste of resources is not the 25 separate connections to a high-bandwidth video call. That's kind of minor. The big waste is these 25 bots running separate LLM queries each.

[–] AeonFelis@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

I'd expect Israel to see the decline at 2024. For Russia I'd expect it to be at 2022. By 2025 these countries probably didn't see a decline simply because they started from a low baseline.

[–] AeonFelis@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I also didn’t mind the two extra buttons, and was a little sad when they went away, because they were largely replaced by the joystick buttons, which I think are hard to use properly.

Weren't the black and white buttons replaced by triggers? The joystick buttons already existed in the first XBox.

[–] AeonFelis@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago (4 children)

The original PS1 controller didn’t have joysticks, and when it did, the position sucked for larger hands. I have always preferred the XBox layout.

Right. I meant the second PS1 controller, not the original one. The design changed over the years, but the general specs stayed as the baseline of controllers.

The XBox layout with its six face buttons did not stick, and the XBox 360 conformed with Sony's design of four face buttons and two triggers. Which makes more sense for shooters (since you have more buttons while keeping your thumb on the right thumbstick)

[–] AeonFelis@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago (6 children)

The entire industry has agreed on a de-facto standard for controllers, which is pretty much the PS1 controller:

  • Two clickable thumbsticks
  • Four face buttons
  • D-pad
  • Four triggers
  • Two menu buttons
  • The only thing the PS1 didn't have (but games can't use it, so maybe it doesn't count?) - a button for showing the platform's menu

You can add things on top of that (trackpads, gyros, making some of these digital buttons analog), but if you don't have that - your controller won't work for games that expect these inputs to be available.

If I had to put a date on when this became the established standard, I'd say 2005 or 2006 - the years when the XBox 360 and the PS3 were released, since both consoles had these capabilities (Nintendo kept doing its own thing, and only supported this standard starting with the Wii U). So when the Steam controller was released in 2015 - this standard was already established, controllers for PC made sure to support it - and even PC games stuck to it.

This is why I think the Steam Controller failed - you had to map it. You couldn't use it like you would a standard controller even if the game was made for standard controllers.

[–] AeonFelis@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Just how docile are your cats? If I'd take my cats to the bus without a container I'd have to run back and forth trying to fish them from the overhead storage racks when I reach my stop.

I tried releasing them in my car once, and they managed to squeeze under the driver and passenger seats. At least that was an environment fully under my control.

[–] AeonFelis@lemmy.world 10 points 4 days ago

The hate being picked up in general, even if there is no threat of vet, so they'll struggle to get out of my arms and if they succeed - I've lost the element of surprise.

Also - I have two cats, and if I need to take both to vet then even if I manage to place one in a carrier he'll alert the other that something is wrong.

[–] AeonFelis@lemmy.world 12 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (13 children)

The problem is getting a hold of them in the first place. They just bolt from one hiding place to another, and I say "hiding place" but they're not as much "hidden" as "hard to reach when you are a human-sized human". The only reason I eventually manage to catch them is that ambush predators get tired quicker than persistence predators.

[–] AeonFelis@lemmy.world 53 points 5 days ago (15 children)

Persistence predation is the only way I can manage to take my cats to the vet.

[–] AeonFelis@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Order of magnitude better. Three orders of magnitudes better once you also fix the misuse of percentages.

[–] AeonFelis@lemmy.world 57 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

No matter where you click, it'll open some pop-unders for the first few clicks.

[–] AeonFelis@lemmy.world 24 points 5 days ago (9 children)

Plot twist - the one calling out your anime pfp has a furry pfp

 

Encountering one of these embedded tweets in a blog post, my hand instinctively moved to click the X and close it. That took me to the website.

Could this be a clever ruse to generate more visits? Is Elon Musk actually more cunning than we give him credit?

 

I have this idea for a certain game development tool, but before I start another side project I want to check if something similar already exists.

An important part of game development is fine-tuning numeric values. You have some numbers that govern things like character motion, weapon impact, enemy AI, or any other game mechanic. For most of these there is no "correct" value that can be calculated (or even verified!) with some algorithm - you have to manually try different values and converge to something that "feels right".

The most naive way to fine-tune these numbers is to have them as hard-coded values, tweak them in code, and re-run the game every time you change them. This, of course, is a tedious process - especially if you have to go through long build times, game loading, and/or gameplay to reach a state where you can test these values (that last hurdle can often be skipped by programming in a special entry point, but that too can get tedious)

A better way would be to write these numbers in configuration file(s) which the game can hot-reload - at least while in development mode. That way you can just edit the file and save it, and the game will reload the new values. This is a huge improvement because it skips the building/loading/preparing which can drastically shorten the cycles - but it's still not perfect because you have to constantly switch between the game and the configuration file.

Sometimes you can use the game engine editor to tweak these while the game is running, or create your own UI. This makes the context switches hurt less, and also lets you use sliders instead of editing textual numbers, but it's still not perfect - you still have to switch back and forth between the game controls and the tweaking interface.

Which brings us to my idea.

What I envision is a local fine-tuning server. The server will either update configuration files which the game will hot-reload, or the game could connect to it via WebSocket (or some other IPC. But I like WebSocket) so that the server could push the new values to it as they get updated.

After the server deduces the structure of the configuration (or read it from a schema - but providing a schema may usually be a overkill) you could use its webapp UI to configure how the values would be tweaked. We usually want sliders, so you'll need to provide a range - even if the exact value is hard to determine, it's usually fairly easy to come up with a rough range that the value must be in (how high can a human jump? More than 5cm, less than 5m). You will also decide for each slider if it's linear or logarithmic.

The server, of course, will save all that configuration so that you won't have t reconfigure it the next time you want to tweak values (unless there are new values, in which case you'll only have to configure the sliders for them)

Since this would be a server, the tweaking of the values could be done from another device - preferably something with a touchscreen, like a smartphone or a tablet, because tweaking many sliders is easier with a touchscreen. So you have the game running on your PC/console, gamepad in hand (or keyboard+mouse, if that's your thing), and as you play you tweak the sliders on the touchscreen until you get them just right.

Does anyone know if a similar tool already exists?

 

Narrative scripting languages like Yarn Spinner or Inkle were originally meant for writing dialogue, but I think they can also be used for scripting the world progression even when no dialogue or even narration is involved.

Example for something silent that can be scripted with a narrative scripting language:

  1. When the player pulls a lever...
  2. Move the camera to show a certain gate
  3. Open the gate
  4. Move the camera to show something interesting behind the gate
  5. Return the camera to the player

Even though no text nor voice are involved here, I think a narrative language will still fit better than a traditional scripting language because:

  • Narrative languages describe everything in steps. Scripting languages will need to work a bit harder to generate steps the actual game engine can use.
  • Narrative languages have visual editor that can help showing the flow of the level as nodes.
  • The interface between a narrative language and the game engine tends to be seems to tend to be higher level (and less powerful) than the one with a traditional scripting language.

On the other hand, flow control seems a bit more crude and ugly with narrative scripting languages than with traditional scripting languages. It should probably still be fine for simple things (e.g. - player activates a keyhole. Do they have the key?), but I wonder if a game can reach a point where it becomes too complex for a narrative language (I'm still talking about simple world progression, not full blown modding)

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