Turniper
10d ago
Text -> Image -> Spritesheet -> 3D Model models are actually already here. They're just pretty bad at giving you usable topology, but you'll probably begin seeing AI generated assets in production games inside a few months. Not big or moving stuff, but static medium poly assets like crates or plants.
There's a few on huggingface, and an integration called BlenderGPT they're working on.
Turniper
10d ago
Wow. Those numbers are blowing my mind as an American currently applying for Irish citizenship. I'd have to do some serious tax planning prior to spending a few years over there, lest I end up paying 42% additional tax on capital gains. This must have been how my great uncle felt when I explained you can just purchase rifles at some Walmarts with no class or license, just a digital background check.
Turniper
13d ago
Congratulations! I'm glad you're finally finding a set of habits that work for you.
Turniper
21d ago
My man you know the answer. You did not put a single positive thing about her in this post.
Turniper
27d ago
Yeah, I found that really difficult too back when I was working full time.
Turniper
27d ago
There's definitely a way to make it work, but part of actually finishing a game is being ruthlessly realistic about what your scope is. And this one is about combat and progression. I've failed at that enough times before that I'm not gonna fall for it here. The juice just probably isn't worth the squeeze to make it a first class feature. It's a thing I can and probably will do in some conversations, but largely for flavor and without the expectation people will come back around a second time.
Turniper
27d ago
I could. Rerunning the direct conversation would feel bad but I could probably do something where I store some conversation outcomes as tags in a dictionary and write further branches in different conversations that check that state. But doing those is lowkey a QA nightmare, since it's a lot of string match checks. I suppose I could write a validator, but even then it'd be real hard to verify that the latter conversation always comes after the former.
Starting to see there are reasons why Hades and it's sequel don't give the player dialogue choices. It's a LOT of state management for a feature that isn't going to be as core to gameplay like it is in say BG3.
Turniper
27d ago
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking just doesn't fit within the design and 1 person scope. Hah, thinking about this reminds me of how dedicated you and Nathan were to the idea of making your own game after college.
Turniper
27d ago
This is pretty much how the existing design works. Characters peak in power at different points in the progression, and you'll want to IE play the necromancer and barbarian a lot early to farm the resouces and build the structures the guy with the mech suit needs to really come online. Whereas their pinnacle upgrades require less grinding and more optional boss kills, so mechanaut maxing out without super-boss drop resources makes him great for grinding difficult bosses in early endgame.
It's more specifically the multiple choice dialogue that doesn't fit into it, because I don't see much player desire to actually start a new save. The central run loop being roguelite means people are almost certain to just keep playing the same save unless I provide a NG+ mode with delineated benefits in exhange for the story (And some level of progression, since that's tied to story) getting reset, or really make chosing dialogue options influential by IE locking out a character depending on your choices. And I don't really want to do either of those, so I'm thinking dialogue options will end up limited, and mostly for flavor. IE no real branching story.
Turniper
29d ago
Cause it's actually super hard to get consistently good output doing that. I might be able to get good 'Hey, X killed you last run' conversations, but even then, with perhaps the easiest scenario, the LLM would have no hope of providing advice like 'Kite ghouls, they're slow and do high melee dps', because it has no context for what the enemy in question is. And it's even more tricky for anything story relevant, since the LLM would need to know its role, so to speak. Its one of those ideas a lot of game devs have an eye on, but even if you can run a decent local bot on the player's machine its something the game needs to be built around, not just a plug and play solution to having good dialogue.
Frankly, I'd be way more likely to write all the dialogue myself and then use AI as a solution for voice acting, since that would actually be a huge labor saver and not have big game design implications.
In general, if you want AI to write a character's dialogue, you probably need the whole character to be proc gen and inconsequential anyway. Like a Dragon's Dogma pawn, not a shopkeeper or alternate playable character with a fixed personality.
Turniper
30d ago
Note: Meandering post as much to get my thoughts in order as to share.
Been bopping along on my roguelite (Basically the core idea is Hades gameplay meets Path of Exile/DotA style build diversity. You start with 1 character unlocked and the rest as NPCs and unlock more as you progress). Currently working on getting a dialogue system setup, and deciding how much player choice I want to provide. I'm kinda in an awkward spot because the whole point of a story heavy rogue-lite is that you keep playing the same save. You experience the story over the course of a lot of runs, and playing more runs, rather than starting a new save, is where the replayability value comes from. Which is great, and the original intent, but it does mean that it's very unlikely players will ever see the results of a second dialogue choice.
I'm considering ways to get around this, because I really like the idea of fleshing out character relationships and giving people choices for how to roleplay the characters. But it would mean really altering the design of the game and doing something like giving you a permadeath failure condition, or letting you start the game as multiple characters, instead of making them all unlockable over time on one save. But permadeath defeats the purpose of a progression focused roguelite (You'd lose all those unlocked weapons and trinkets!), and playing clean runs as different characters doesn't actually solve the multiple choice dialogue only getting seen once issue, since I'd get to write a fuck-ton of dialogue from everyone's perspective and you still probably only have 1 save per character.
I'm probably gonna add dialogue choice options for normal conversations anyway, but they'll end up being mostly for flavor and largely useless. Maybe a couple for 'makes unlocking character easier/harder depending on if you read their personality right' or 'choose between rewards/different character's favor'. I need dialogue choice as a concept anyway for hub and spoke style 'ask character about things' interactions, and I'm big on choice and customization in general.
Anyway, after I write the integration for that (Using Inkle's Ink and it's simple unity api. Everything else was too big and writing my own fancy GUI looked unfun, so I'm just gonna build features off Ink tags), I'll be working on simplifying my code for melee attacks. They're a slightly awkward feature because I built them within my framework for 'abilities'. That works well for things like attacks where you charge and hold, and one off attacks, but it's kinda weird for attacks that have mechanics like a 3 hit combo (Because mana cost and cast time is configured at the ability level, but I might want different costs or delays per attack in the combo). Also the way I handle animations currently isn't very flexible, so I need to figure out exactly how I'm handling animators and animation clip swapping between enemies/players.
Anyway, once I get all that done I'll be swapping over to art mode for a bit to flesh out the first biome and it's first miniboss. And add some clothes, so I can take screenshots and not have nude humanoid models everywhere.
Turniper
1mo ago
I think the more realistic take is basically Thor displayed bare minimum competence and saved himself. Which is fine, unlike the other people involved he didn't actually cause the problem. But if he'd utilized the tools in his class perfectly, he probably could have saved them with crowd control. People expect a lot from him because he's spent a great deal of time playing and working on WoW and think he should have played not merely well, but optimally, given the reputation.
Turniper
1mo ago
The steel man for keeping things as fast as possible is that anything artificial we impose might be worse and fucking up market making would be a pretty big deal. So much money hinges on that a regulator really cannot afford some dumb solution that benefits a single arbitrary party or is open to abuse. It's not an unsolveable problem, but just letting people compete on speed does solve it pretty well, so there's not a ton of incentive to fuck with what currently works.
Crypto is trying a bunch of different things to solve their version of this (They refer to it as MEV, basically the problem of block producers reordering transactions to extract value by front-running), and solving it algorithimically at the protocol level in a way that doesn't have some sort of drawback is currently proving really difficult.
Turniper
1mo ago
This was a gorgeous read and I enjoyed it greatly. If you're ever back in Texas and passing through Austin, your family is welcome at our place for dinner.
Turniper
1mo ago
They're not travellers, but fully 20% of my irish relatives are just coming off US travel bans for visa overstays in their twenties (Most of them got 10-15 year bans). It was (probably still is) incredibly common to just take a holiday to the US and not come back home for 4 or 5 years.
Turniper
2mo ago
Nah. SBF straight up embezzled money. Lots of other crypto exchanges went down because they made dumb decisions, and their executives didn't get jailed. SBF stole customer funds and gambled with them. That's a crime. Making idiotic loans like the CEOs of Voyager and Celsius did isn't. Given the volume of money he stole, 25 years is pretty appropriate.
Turniper
2mo ago
You can test the suppressor before using it in your assassination attempt lol. That's not a real issue.
Turniper
2mo ago
This logic is why democrats lost. Having a mentally competent commander in chief is more important than ensuring everyone sticks to party talking points. Having an open primary is not some optional feature you only do when it's convenient to rev up enthusiasm. Perhaps the party wouldn't have needed to win back so many voters if they didn't betray the nation's trust.
Turniper
2mo ago
My dad's on it. Weight loss has been solid, but he's had bouts of intense nausea for months that are only beginning to ease up now several months in.
Turniper
2mo ago
Pretty sure it was this one: https://exploringegregores.wordpress.com/
Turniper
3mo ago
My last story was up on Royal Road and some forum sites and got in the low 5 figures of readers and all the commentary that entails, both good and bad. I have an open offer to get it professionally published, but I'm taking time away from it to write something else atm. Having a stranger post a long review detailing exactly the things you know you got wrong is exceedingly unpleasant to experience. It's easy to shrug off the inevitable lunatics, but a well reasoned critique from someone who likes the story in the abstract cuts deep.
Turniper
3mo ago
Oh yeah writing is brutal for this. Just wait til you begin showing your work to a larger audience, the swings get even more violent.
Turniper
3mo ago
I'm not sure this is necessarily the case here. Doing fentanyl is pretty much the definition of being out of the bounds of proscribed behavior. There's a lot of people who all into fentanyl from life dealing them a harsh hand, but there's also no shortage that just fall into the path of trying then abusing harder and harder opiates. Seems a little premature to assume the man in this case is one or the other when both paths are very real.
Oh wow, this sounds exhausting. Did ya'll know about the differing perspectives prior to having a kid or did it come up later?
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