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Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

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Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#241

Post by allarm »

glimshe wrote: post #185
Aerroon wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a huge Steam backlog Yeah, and by the time you get to many of those games they will feel clunky and outdated. It's not just the graphics that ages, but also the game mechanics, UI and UX, and the general presentation of the game. I would rather play Path of Exile than Diablo 2. > I concede that that’s always been the case for durable written works thanks to the local library. But the scale of convenient supp…

> It's difficult to point out what is better about the more recently written stories, but somehow they are more appealing (in some aspects) For starters, the use of the language. Even a book written 20-30 years ago can feel a bit off in word choice and idioms. I know many people are into that, but for others it just increases the cognitive load of reading.

The purpose of reading is to challenge your mind, literally the cognitive load. If slang from 20 years ago is preventing you from reading a book, that’s a sign of mental laziness.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#242

Post by noduerme »

wil421 wrote: post #78
noduerme wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was working at a web shop in San Francisco when the Web 1.0 bubble burst. The period leading up to that was characterized by company execs buying themselves all kinds of expensive new cars and toys, and a kind of hysteria on the part of clients that their brick and mortar businesses were being left behind if they didn't spend gobs of money on websites that had all kinds of gizmos and information but were, essential…

A former professor went through startups to acquisition with 7 or so startups during this era. He said one VC kept funding them. The VC visited their new office and said this is why we love you guys everyone else we are funding drive brand new Mercedes.

I had the displeasure of working for a new crop of the same kind of people for web 2.0. There's something amazing about people who never build anything but come into the world sure that they can tell other people how to do it, and happy to take 90% of the money for making the sale. Takes a lotta chutzpah, in the original derogatory sense. What I learned from this industry is that there are more of them in the world than us, and far more of them than there are positions for them, so theirs is a vicious and dark dog-eat-dog reality where concepts like "act as if" and "fake it till you make it" are genuine currency, as opposed to stuff like idk working hard and shipping something.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#243

Post by true_religion »

pibaker wrote: post #215
true_religion wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Namely... every society in existence before the year 1496. Our current form of property rights includes copyright, which had no formal treatment until the city of Venice issued a decree that fined anyone who printed an author's work without direct permission. Previous to that, the effort of copying a book was seen as so high, that one deserved reward simply for doing that. In fact, there were times that copying books…

So your argument is what worked back when most people were illiterate and books were a luxury and audio and video recordings were non existent will also work today?

I feel like you're searching for an argument when all they did was ask for a factual point, and I gave them one.

All the nuance you're trying to imply about technology and the time period being non-modern is already embedded into my comment.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#244

Post by cykros »

asdff wrote: post #126
munificent wrote: post #20

1. Human attention is a finite resource. 2. Digital media allows a single authored work to consume the attention of an unbounded number of people with near zero marginal cost. Further, once a work has been authored, it is available to be consumed forever. 3. Computers, software, the web, and now AI have drastically lowered the cost to produce a work of digital media. You can't have fixed demand and have the supply in…

I'd argue that supply isn't really increasing. I mean, are we seeing 10x as many movies being released? NYT is now 10x as thick? Every source of quality has upped its quantity by 10x? Not at all. Seems output in this brave new AI era is more or less the exact same as it was in the dark ages. The only output that has gone up, logarithmically at that, is spam and other low effort fodder. I also want to push back on the…

Idk about 10x but I know I get my podcasts at 2x speed.

1x makes it sound like they're not on enough cocaine.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#245

Post by louthy »

lobf wrote: post #115
louthy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? If you mean the games industry, it was always poorly run. I worked in games in the 90s and 00s it was a cottage industry of nerds, many of whom had success with an 8bit game in the 80s (where they did everything: a one person team), to then have to run large teams of devs/artists/designers/etc without any leadership experience and more complex hardware.…

This is one of my favorite eras / subjects in tech history. I was just recently reading about the history of the Ultima series and you’re describing Richard Garriott. As games were pressured to be bigger and prettier and use 3D graphics, suddenly the lack of managerial experience (partly) caused the later games to spin out of control and they were forced to release a series of bad titles that brought the whole franch…

If you find this stuff interesting, you can read about the failure of the first game I worked on here [1].

I replied in the comments [2]

It says 1997, but dev started in ‘95, I joined in ‘96.

I was pretty gutted at the time, I was just 21 years old and had the big dreams of working in games. It soon becomes clear that very few titles succeed. Luckily I had a few wins on the way, but the lack of professionalism really did get tiring.

[1] https://www.unseen64.net/2020/11/16/lunatik-pure-entertainme...

[2] https://www.unseen64.net/2020/11/16/lunatik-pure-entertainme...

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#246

Post by glimshe »

allarm wrote: post #241
glimshe wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's difficult to point out what is better about the more recently written stories, but somehow they are more appealing (in some aspects) For starters, the use of the language. Even a book written 20-30 years ago can feel a bit off in word choice and idioms. I know many people are into that, but for others it just increases the cognitive load of reading.

The purpose of reading is to challenge your mind, literally the cognitive load. If slang from 20 years ago is preventing you from reading a book, that’s a sign of mental laziness.

Many/most people don't read for a mental workout.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#247

Post by sfn42 »

bugbull wrote: post #145
zetanor wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>people are also demonstrably not that discriminating at what they spend their attention on now matter how unsatisfying the experience was, once it's spent it's gone I've refunded more games than I've kept on Steam over the past decade. While there's now a much wider pool of games, there's not necessarily a much deeper pool of games. Since trash sells and since marketing a game has been absurdly difficult recently, I…

What I’m really shocked is that mobile gaming is as dire as it is. My iPhone from some years back was capable of running full blown Civ6 and earlier total war games. Despite the hardware clearly being capable of running interesting, complex games, the market is dominated by shitty gacha games, copy paste puzzle games and scams.

The problem is that the mobile touch screen interface is complete ass. There are people who play all kinds of games on mobile, for example I know there's some league of legends games on mobile and I think there are some first person shooters etc bu i wouldn't even consider trying them personally, simply because I'm not interested in trying to use the touch screen to control complex game mechanics.

It can work for simpler concepts like card games, Balatro comes to mind for example.

Also personally I think the whole concept just appeals to less discriminating audiences. I never play any game that can be described as pay to win, I don't care how good it is, if you can pay for progress or advantage I'm no longer interested. But mobile games seem to both facilitate the pay to win and generally just value-extracting systems with app store purchases etc, and appeal more to people who are willing to pay ridiculous amounts of money for progress and advantages.

I did play one pay to win game while I was on vacation once, it's called The Tower and its honestly completely stupid. I tried playing it for free and it kind of just makes it impossible to progress at a satisfying pace without payment, then you have to pay significant amounts like $20-50 for relatively minor upgrades, a conservative player just buying the "necessities" to enjoy the game would probably end up spending way $50-100 or more, and it doesn't end there. The discord had people bragging that they'd spent like $40k on this stupid low effort mobile game. The studio makes millions on a monthly basis. It's ridiculous.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#248

Post by bob1029 »

vuurmot wrote: post #239
bob1029 wrote: post #125

Game dev is the last thing I think will be genuinely disrupted by AI. It can do everything at the edges with superhuman ability, but the core magic happens in the scene where all the disparate systems come together to provide the final experience. Working in arbitrary world space is pretty much the hardest thing I can imagine asking an LLM to do. I also think things like animation, sfx and mastering will never be dis…

there already tons of interesting games generated over at www.reddit.com/r/aigamedev I think it is over

What would you say is the best example of an AI created game?

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#249

Post by simonra »

ChoGGi wrote: post #214
msm_ wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yeah, and by the time you get to many of those games they will feel clunky and outdated. I don't agree with what you wrote literally (I almost exclusively play old and old-ish games, and I have fun), but: >Path of Exile is a 2013 free-to-play action role-playing video game developed and published by Grinding Gear Games I'm confused. Why is your example of a modern game is a game from 2013? Most people's backlog is p…

He may have meant poe2; it came out last year? Then again the remaster of d2 was fairly recent and quite playable by my standards.

PoE2 is still in early access, I feel it would be wrong to say that it is out until the makers claim that the product is ready to stand on its own two feet in the market

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#250

Post by aldous »

threetonesun wrote: post #134
fzeroracer wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think as a developer this is one of the biggest takeaways I've had from this whole thing. I used to view features sitting endlessly in a JIRA backlog as a bad sign; a signal that we weren't prioritizing the right thing. But in reality this serves as a natural selection mechanic; if devs don't care enough about it to get it done and PM doesn't see the value in it then it slowly fades away. With agents you can just t…

I'm a big fan of forgetting. I throw out the phrase "forgetting is the point" a lot, loosely paraphrased from some musician (I forget who!) that said if you couldn't remember the lyrics they must not have been very good. Somewhere in the original spirit of Agile there was no Jira board, because the next thing to do was obvious to the team, and if it wasn't obvious it was easily discoverable, just go ask some users wh…

Paul McCartney maybe?

"We were writing songs that were memorable, not because we wanted them to be memorable but because we had to remember them"

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