_manifold

It's actually surprising to see the amount of negativity surrounding Godot on HN. The top comment in the thread about Godot's 3.5 release was someone talking about how Godot's feature set is "below average" compared to Unreal. I think you would be hard pressed to find any Godot user that thinks it is in the same class with a product developed by hundreds of engineers at a billion dollar company. Yet, because it has an enthusiastic user base (which is a good sign for a FOSS project), that somehow it has to compete with all solutions in its category. To your point, it would be like comparing Blender to 3DS Max or Maya in the mid 2000s.

I think the current generation of AI-based art/design tools like DALL-E are going to have their use, but more as a supplemental support for actual human designers and artists.

It would really depend on the application, but for design especially I think the big limitation being run into is that the tools can only be trained on content that is currently available. All of these generated designs look extremely generic down to the Corporate Memphis/Alegria type artwork which is trendy right now. Outside of unintended behavior there isn't much of a way to push the envelope or generate a "new" style without the eye of a human.

As tools like this gain more widespread use, it will also become increasingly important to discriminate heavily on what content makes it into the datasets used for these tools. AI-based tools trained on AI-generated content sounds like a recipe for stagnation.

> The big pitch was that you could have non-copyable items which you could move between virtual worlds.

The whole "moving objects between virtual worlds" thing is one of the most ridiculous concepts I see pushed by the crypto/NFT/web3 community.

As you've outlined there is a potential for this functionality in non-game/metaverse environments - even if NFTs fail to do it properly.

However, when this gets applied to video games at large, I really start to roll my eyes. Even if you could magically hand-wave away all the technical issues that go along with trying to implement something like this - why would developers even bother? Game economies have to be tightly controlled to combat things like RMT, botting, and unsanctioned item trading. Letting people transfer in any item they want basically makes that impossible.

Wow, fantastic. That's an awesome tip!

> Android for example has clearly a bunch of bugs where some stupid slow animations cannot be tured off. Yes even with turning off animations in accessibility and via the developper options.

I recently found out about Android's animation disable feature and holy hell it made my phone feel so much more snappy and responsive to input. But as you mentioned there are too many bugs - one of the more annoying ones is that loading wheels (which I would prefer to keep because you have to wait anyway) are not animated. I'm tempted to use it anyway. Hopefully in the future Android will add some sort of categorization/prioritization for animations so things can be tweaked more.

I may be in the minority here but I am kind of annoyed with how "juicing" the interface/experience seems to be kind of bleeding over into general applications from the game development scene. It does make sense for games and some apps but in general I don't need animations and tweens attached to every button on my phone.

I have a similar thing but with music/sounds - I do a lot of work (albeit non-professional) with audio and I when I hear things I tend to visualize a sort of waveform or overall shape/envelope to the sound. There are other visual aspects to certain types sounds that accentuate it. It seems like a very slight, learned synesthesia.

I think that the term "fun" is pretty narrow and ultimately a poor descriptor of what makes a game interesting to play. It seems like a lot of discussions on the subject tend toward this realization. "Engaging" or "compelling" I think are potentially better words but both sound pretty sterile and corporate to me.

The fact is that these particular situations are much more complex than a false dichotomy of "good" and "evil" corporations, or "large" and "small" corporations.

Take any organization you think is "worthy" of being attacked in this manner, and consider all of the implications of such an attack. Think about the people inside the organization, and those outside of the organization that benefit from that its continued operations.

I think it's fair to say the public opinion of oil companies is fairly low; however, arguably the biggest impact of the Colonial Pipeline attack was not on the executives running the company, but on the end customers of gas stations unable to fuel their vehicles due to the shortage (whether truly real or created by panic). I would argue that everyday workers unable to get to work or to the store to buy food is more important than a few executives not getting their bonuses or having their shares lose value.

This isn't to say that these corporations are above all reproach and should be allowed to continued operating in whatever way they see fit simply because they have employees and customers are relying on them. But it's also the wrong mindset to think that it's OK to attack corporations in this way just because they "deserve it" in some way.

Agreed on all points. The concepts of colonialism, imperialism, and military supremacy aren't anything new. What is considered "fair game" for thematic devices in entertainment seems to be based on temporal proximity to the subject matter and also simply what is currently deemed to be "tasteful."

If there was an as-successful board game based on conquering Asia and Europe as Genghis Khan, nobody would bat an eye. And yet Genghis Khan was responsible for actions that were arguably worse multiple times over than anything that occurred in Puerto Rico during the colonial period.

> “I think there’s a growing understanding that using historic colonialism in a sanitized fashion—omitting all of its wrongs—has its own problems,” Reuss said. “Even though you’re not depicting torture, rape, massacre, enslavement, and genocide in your game, you’re promoting a false narrative about colonialism, which covers up all of those terrible things.”

All these things occur and have occurred during war and we have hundreds (thousands?) of games about warfare that do not include these topics. Is every single one these games promoting a false narrative as well? I suppose he might agree. Regardless, I think it's infeasible to expect every game that uses colonialism or war as a device to have some sort of comprehensive moral indictment of the things it portrays.

>How do you tell the neural net when to dust or ward?

My knowledge on what is feasible with AI is fairly limited, so maybe a proposition like this is a bit naive - but wouldn't a more effective solution be to use some sort of machine learning/neural net hybrid that also incorporates data from matches played high-skill teams?

From what I'm reading, OpenAI trains the neural net entirely by playing games against itself, and only uses matches against humans as benchmarks - so it essentially only develops strategies of play that primarily work well against itself. In most cases those probably coincide with strategies that work against human teams, but it seems like a lot of information is going to go missing - which is probably why it's only been successful in certain subsets of the game.

It reminds me of a story I read a while back about two children who grew up relatively isolated from the rest of society, but had access to musical instruments. Since they had no teacher and apparently no other training materials, they developed an entirely unique style of performance and composition. Obviously in the case of music "success" is entirely subjective so simply being different doesn't invalidate it. But the point of OpenAI is to eventually beat human players in all aspects of the game - and if it's not going to actually train against humans, then success is going to be at least partially coincidental. So I would definitely agree that OpenAI (as it stands right now) has some potentially insurmountable weaknesses.

> Same if you get junk mail in your mailbox that prominently displays a sign “NO JUNK MAIL”. Call them. Ask to speak to the person who put illegal advertising in your mailbox. When they blame it on the deliverer, say “Do you realise you are legally responsible for any illegal action you pay someone else to perform?”

Asking barbed, rhetorical questions to a stranger over the phone isn't "being assertive", especially when the person you're speaking to most likely has little to no control over the thing you are complaining about.

To quote The Big Lebowski: "You're not wrong, Walter. You're just an asshole!"

Dropping SEO optimized results from a search is a bit of an oxymoronical idea. You'd essentially be punishing websites for simply ranking higher in search results which doesn't make sense.

I would assume they would be inexpensive to host as well. That's a given. I'm more interested in how much money they can make.

Simply running ads doesn't really seem like an issue as long as you're not making the site unusable. I'd be more concerned about the fact that the average user in need of a base64 converter is arguably more likely to be using an adblocker.

> Most of these wouldn't make much money, maybe enough to cover hosting.

Do you have any personal experience or any other sources that estimate this kind of thing? I'm legitimately curious, I've often wondered what kind of revenue these types of things pull in. Obviously if they're not running ads and don't have any explicit monetization then it would be very little. But I always wonder about the ones that do.

The roots may actually go back further than that. There's a custom map for Starcraft/Brood War which used single hero control and lane pushing mechanics and predates the WC3 DotA maps:

https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/Aeon_of_Strife_(map)

It is exactly the nature of game dev. Most people fail to understand the level of complexity behind it. I think there's also this false sense that "basic features" in games are both simple to implement and universally applicable.

By example, grab two successful games that are considered to be in the same genre - say, Counter-Strike Global Offensive and Call of Duty - and compare them on a single, "basic" feature like character movement. There are actually massive differences in how they feel and play, and it goes much deeper than just tweaking some settings on a customizable character controller asset.

It's easy to take stuff like this for granted and just assume the implementation is simple. In reality it is much more complex than that, and many of the differences that seem subtle may actually be much greater when it comes to design and programming.

If your metric for success is simply how much money is being pumped through it, then in a sense NFTs are successful (although NFT prices and volume have been plummeting recently [0]).

However, I believe that the majority of people driving the popularity of NFTs fall into two overlapping camps: people who are simply trying to make money, and people who misunderstand or are otherwise oblivious to how the technology works and its limitations. To me it just seems more like a gold rush situation and does nothing to inspire confidence in the underlying technology.

Certainly there are people out there trying to leverage NFTs for more legitimate purposes - such as digital rights management and virtual items for video games - and those applications may be dubious enough by themselves. In the way they are generally being used, though, I wouldn't call NFTs a "success" any more than the South Sea Bubble was.

[0] https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2021/04/30/prices-nfts-dropping/