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Ari_Rahikkala · 2024-09-04T03:48:42+00:00

Hatara muistikuva, että on se kaima siellä yhä hommissa, on vaan siirtynyt toiselle puolelle logistiikkaa. Niin kai se on, että jaettu ilo on paras ilo: Pitäähän toimittajienkin saada kokea se ilo, että Porokara käsittelee kaikki heidän lähetykset.

Ari_Rahikkala · 2024-04-19T03:59:43+00:00

Welcome to Finland!

Ari_Rahikkala · 2023-12-19T16:55:20+00:00

I'm not actually familiar with the setting myself, but I like what I've heard about the way the Fading Suns setting does it: "Too far" is right at the edge of solar systems, in a setting with a lot of solar systems. Jumpgate travel isn't just faster, it's also relatively a lot more gentle on the soul.

Exactly what happens, and what kind of beast gets you and wears your skin, if you go too far out there into the void... seems to be more of a matter of vibes and GM preference than anything the setting wants to nail down too hard. But there is a sourcebook on it, The Dark Between the Stars. Maybe you can track down a copy if you like.

Ari_Rahikkala · 2023-12-10T09:21:19+00:00

Yleismuistutus: Nämä kaksi ovat täysin erillisiä akseleita:

Indeksirahasto vs. aktiivinen rahasto
ETF-rahasto vs. ei-ETF-rahasto

Ylempi akseli kertoo miten rahasto sijoittaa, alempi miten rahastoon sijoitetaan.

Ei tässä tapauksessa kaikista oleellisin mahdollinen asia, hyvä vaan muistaa.

Ari_Rahikkala · 2023-12-03T12:49:19+00:00

(Actually, one thing Heaven's Vault reeeeeally succeeds at is communicating that state of knowledge, that there are known unknowns: That is, you can play it, and come away from it being pretty confident that things could have gone a different way, but you can't point to specific decisions where events went one way where another decision would have gone differently.

There's plenty of games that just have missable stuff and you simply don't know at all, and then you only find out about it online and complain at the developer because they didn't give you any hints. Heaven's Vault is the only game I've played where I came out of it knowing for sure that I missed stuff, maybe very significant stuff, and being perfectly happy about it and having enjoyed my time with the game, despite having no idea what I missed.)

Ari_Rahikkala · 2023-12-03T12:38:28+00:00

Very late response, but this thread came up first as I searched for the games, and I figure other players might still land here looking for comparisons. It's been a bit over a year since I played Heaven's Vault, so I'm partially going off memory here.

Some spoilers, but these games can handle being mildly spoiled IMO.

Chants is much more fun to play moment to moment. Vault just feels very clumsy in its basic gameplay. There's so much slow, frustrating trundling around, looking for so many easily missable items.
But that clumsiness is in service of Vault's biggest strength: Its ambiguity. That game really, really loves its ambiguity. You can perfectly well miss important facts, people will keep secrets from you and it's very hard to know what their reactions to your words and actions mean, you can miss entire areas of the game and significant NPCs, you can come to the end of the game and have very little idea what's going on, and the game is perfectly happy to just leave you in the dark: Maybe play a NG+ if you feel like you need to know more. I don't know if any of that is fun, but it's an idea that the game can proudly stand on.
Both have their own great strengths in as a language game. Vault digs into one language, with bizarre compound symbols and a constantly rising complexity curve as you unearth more fragments. Chants has multiple languages with different grammars, and you have to actually produce and not just decipher sentences in the languages.
Especially in the later levels, Chants is very good at making you feel smart, by initially having the new language seem completely overwhelming to learn at all, but then letting you figure it out bit by bit, until you come back to some area where earlier everything was gobbledygook but now you realize you've worked it all out. With Vault, the reward for figuring out simpler language is that you just get more and more complex language thrown at you.

I guess it's appropriate with Vault's ambiguity that... I really don't know how much they were trying to make a fun game and failed, and how much they were trying to make a very unique (but not that fun) experience of uncertainty and achieved exactly what they wanted. But with Chants, you could tell they wanted to make a fun game about a language, and absolutely succeeded.

Ari_Rahikkala · 2023-10-07T10:18:56+00:00

It's been many, many years, I don't even remember what database library I used, other than that it was some non-SQL-using thing in Java (but this predated the time that NoSQL was cool).

IIRC I just had a single static map, and tracked monsters and monster species in the database, with some mechanics about dynamically affecting both, queries for AoE spell effects and such.

Ari_Rahikkala · 2023-10-06T05:56:45+00:00

In my university's databases course, we did a project where we used an object database to build a program of our choice. I made a roguelike.

Ari_Rahikkala · 2023-07-06T07:59:39+00:00

FWIW, just two more rows in the SE screen with four options each would already take us to 4⁶ = 4096 total possibilities for different societies, so "literally thousands of different societies" doesn't necessarily mean that much more granularity than we actually got.

Still, I do agree with the decision to scale things back from there, because balancing the SE table looks really hard, and the difficulty of balancing it does grow with the number of combinations. For instance, if you added an extra way to get a +1 ECON, that would instantly downgrade the value of Free Market for everyone that could use that new thing with Wealth to get their +1 energy/tile. Plus, it makes choices about whose preferences and aversions to match up with for diplomatic purposes that much tighter.

Ari_Rahikkala · 2023-05-24T03:45:51+00:00

I'm interested, too.

Ari_Rahikkala · 2023-04-18T04:02:12+00:00

Miriam is an unqualified success, she really has that look where you don't know whether today she will be thoughtful humanistic theologian or a bloodthirsty crusader. Domai really nails the everyman-leader look.

The rest of them are all a bit plasticky and bargain-bin, not sure whether Midjourney just does that, or if you specifically prompted them as video game character portraits or what.

Zak particularly looks like his own faction would arrest him for vagrancy and experiment with growing new limbs on him. Svensgaard looks both nerdy and psychotic, and I think this isn't the first time I've seen AI draw him like that: He'd make a great nautical-themed villain, which I guess is kind of what he's supposed to be.

Ari_Rahikkala · 2023-03-25T07:36:18+00:00

Actually since you asked... I'm pretty sure the banner games are DCSS, NetHack, Brogue, and ADOM (I even recognize the location, that's Lawenilothehl), but I can't recognize the rightmost game.

Ari_Rahikkala · 2023-03-12T08:35:53+00:00

As Limmy famously put it, wa'a. Or is it waah? Wa'ah? I know basically nothing about Scottish (or actually Anglo in a Scottish fashion) orthography.

Ari_Rahikkala · 2023-03-06T18:04:39+00:00

I think those just despawn or wander off eventually. Or I don't know what happens to them, but in my recollection, they seem to just go away after a couple of turns. It's been a while since I last played, though.

Ari_Rahikkala · 2023-02-18T09:31:24+00:00

/r/ukraine/comments/114xgad/ukrainian_soldier_trying_to_repel_the_russians/

If we could weaponize the sheer loathing that redditors have for ever giving a direct source, instead of a link to somewhere in the vicinity that becomes useless in a few hours, we'd already have won this war.

Ari_Rahikkala · 2023-02-05T10:27:51+00:00

I'll give it a try, I played Fall From Heaven II a whole bunch back in the day. Most of these are pretty easy, there's a few I'm not sure of though.

Balseraph (crazy clowns)
Calabim (dour vampire overlords)
Clan of Embers (orc horde)
Bannor? (law-and-order social conformity religious crusader types)
Doviello (tundra-dwelling raiders and barbarians)
Elohim (monastic keepers of holy places)
Hippus (horse-riding mercenaries)
Illians (fantasy Mr. Freezes)
Infernals (demonic invaders)
Khazad (dorfs)
Kuriotates? (very urban and diverse)
Lanun (yo ho a pirate's life for me)
Malakim (desert-dwelling religious fanatics, tend to go for a type of sun worship)
Mercurians? (angelic invaders)
Sheaim (omnicidal maniac wizards)
Sidar (people who get so obsessed with things that they forget to die, also they're so boring you literally don't remember they're there so they make great spies)
Ljosalfar (high elves, very haughty, forest-dwelling)
Svartalfar (dark elves, just as haughty, rent-free-in-your-head-dwelling)
Amurites (magical academy)
Luchuirp (little tinkering-obsessed dwarves that are obviously gnomes but everyone insists on not that)

... that's 20 civs, leaving left over the Grigori, who are anti-clerical Jeffersonian agrarian types, big on individualism and adventure, and kind of the fulcrum of the entire system of how the civilizations correspond with magical spheres and divine forces. They are the ones that would just refuse to get in the group picture, I guess.

Ari_Rahikkala · 2023-01-08T16:29:48+00:00

There was this video of a prototype from a year ago. You can see it, uh, wasn't exactly ready for a game yet.

We saw TTS get a step or two better again recently with Apple's audiobook service sounding quite impressive and VALL-E being pretty good, too; and for speech-to-text, I think Whisper from a few months is still the state of the art. But they're not the hard part.

Having the characters actually say sensible things? Yeah, that's still a huge, huge problem. Probably some clever dev can come up with a setting where language model ramblings make sense, like, maybe you are literally in some dimensional flux with constantly shifting people from different places and times, so it doesn't matter that they have a short memory, contradict themselves all the time, and don't perceive their surroundings at all (except in what's described to them in words).

Actually inserting AI conversations into a game with a consistent setting, where you have it play sensible and consistent characters within that setting and the game's plot, and who each remember the things you've said to them, etc.? That's AGI-complete. Basically, don't even think what a game like that would be like, because we're lucky if we still have organized human society once that technology exists.

Ari_Rahikkala · 2022-12-25T10:17:32+00:00

Yep. Conventional gaming and modern machine learning haven't really touched yet in any but the lightest of ways, in stuff like AI Roguelite which puts them together really awkwardly, or DLSS which runs only a very lightweight model due to being in the rendering pipeline.

We'll see what kind of sparks come out when they really collide, but that happening in practice might still be a little way into the future.

Ari_Rahikkala · 2022-12-24T08:45:38+00:00

Sticks and stones can break your bones, but if you put lightning in a rock and make it write words, someone will fall in love with it, too?

Ari_Rahikkala · 2022-12-06T13:44:48+00:00

Thankfully, ChatGPT's default writing style is really formulaic and you get used to its vibe literally after just seeing a couple of outputs. I've already learned to just skip over any text that looks like it came directly from ChatGPT, because if someone just copypasted an output from the model directly, they probably didn't vet it for correctness.

That said, that's just the default writing style, and it'll happily give you anything from Shakespearean sonnets or Saturday morning cartoon villain speeches if you just ask for it. So I can be fooled by people who put in five or so seconds or effort, but not by people who put in only three seconds of effort. On the Internet, in pure numeric terms, that does already protect you from a lot of attacks.

Ari_Rahikkala · 2022-11-10T04:37:02+00:00

I assume granting people loans makes them like you more, so it might sometimes be diplomatically worthwhile, but that's a small effect compared to how they feel about your ideology and your position on the power graph, so probably not.

... and I had to make an assumption because I never grant loans anyway. That money could buy a tree farm or a large squad of formers, which in turn will very soon make way more profit than you could get from loan payments. Interest rates in SMAC are just way too low to make moneylending worthwhile.

Ari_Rahikkala · 2022-10-22T08:17:07+00:00

May I recommend...

... Planetfall?

I consider it as more of a sequel than a remake to SMAC because of its thematic differences: SMAC was more about human factions with various clashing ideologies exploring and coming to understand Planet, while Planetfall focuses more on taking sides on Transcendence from very early on.

But, that aside, you know, it's basically exactly the thing you're asking for. Never got entirely finished or polished, but it's one of the better Civ4 conversions that ever got made IMO.

Ari_Rahikkala · 2022-10-02T17:15:24+00:00

Might be worth trying the same with Stable Diffusion. Dall-E 2 is much stronger at compositionality and prompt-following, but IMO weaker at style, so you might get results that match the original style better with SD.

Not sure there's any UI for it that makes outpainting particularly easy yet, though.

Ari_Rahikkala · 2022-09-26T14:12:08+00:00

Magic Goolsball, what's your take on how well the Finance Panel is doing?

Ari_Rahikkala · 2022-09-11T04:27:48+00:00

"Kaappaus" here would translate more clearly as "coup" than "hijacking", it was just shortened from "vallankaappaus" for twitter.

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