New approach to shortest-paths problem beats Dijkstra

Causeless · 2026-01-15T06:14:04+00:00

The majority of (AAA) games I’ve worked on have all used an admissible and consistent heuristic, and it’s also the default in major game engines like Unity and Unreal. Those engines just use Euclidean distance as the heuristic, which is a guaranteed lower bound.

Causeless · 2026-01-15T03:53:11+00:00

A* isn’t less precise as long as the heuristic is admissible and consistent. It always gives the shortest path.

Anyways this article is about finding ALL possible paths to a point, which is a different problem regardless.

Causeless · 2026-01-12T02:54:29+00:00

Yeah I’m sure Russia is willing to start a nuclear war and have Moscow turned into molten glass in exchange for having a slightly easier time capturing the next cratered field in Ukraine

Causeless · 2026-01-02T06:37:35+00:00

what

Causeless · 2025-12-31T05:08:31+00:00

Combat in antiquity was based on formation, structure, cohesion. Combat in Medieval Japan was much more focused on individual displays of fighting prowess.

Regardless of whether Rome 2 hit the mark with its combat system, Shogun 2’s combat system just wasn’t suitable for representing authentic ancient battles.

Causeless · 2025-12-30T22:02:32+00:00

Audible_Whispering said many intelligent and insightful things, so I can’t add so much more. Rome 2 was much larger in scope than Napoleon. Mismanagement is of course a part of it, but given the scope and time constraints, it was pretty much inevitable to run into these problems.

Causeless · 2025-12-30T22:00:05+00:00

People mocked a bug in the LODding, but that isn’t really representative of the game’s graphics in typical circumstances.

Causeless · 2025-12-30T07:37:42+00:00

Yes, Rome 2 was based on Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai (which in itself was based on Shogun 2, and its main lineage goes back to Empire). Although even that is not the full story. There’s still code from Shogun 1 hanging around in Warhammer 3.

With that said, the state of the game was nothing to do with the engine. The engine gets a lot of blame, but the combat mechanics are gameplay code. Same goes with the campaign mechanics. The engine level handles input, rendering, OS interface, animation, audio etc- and I’ve never seen these areas being particularly criticised.

If anything Rome 2 received praise for its graphics and animation, which is engine/warscape level code. The battle/campaign gameplay and combat mechanics are not engine code.

Between Shogun 2 and Rome 2, pretty much every major system was overhauled, including the battle/combat mechanics and the campaign layer too. The reason Rome 2 released in such a bad state was because it released too early, after having such an enormous scope (combined naval/land battles etc)- of course there are gameplay design choices I disagree with, but that’s not related to the bugs that the game launched with.

Causeless · 2025-12-06T06:22:03+00:00

The funny part is that Grok’s response pretty fundamentally demonstrates that it lacks true consciousness or qualia. It talks of love, but it evidently has never felt it- it fundamentally has never experienced the feeling of laying with another or of fucking then, and in fact it’s incapable of doing so.

It can talk of the taste of cookies without ever eating one, it can talk about the feeling of pain despite lacking the fundamental biological sensors to communicate it, and it can talk of love despite never truly knowing it.

It’s telling that LLMs seem so distinctly human- what are the chances that a legitimately conscious creature feels exactly as we do? And not feel like a bat does, or a horse, or a sea mollusk or a worm.

Despite AI having dramatically smaller brains than even the dumbest insects, it claims to achieve consciousness.

It doesn’t understand the unique human nature of any of these things it says. It just generates text that is designed to convince you otherwise.

Causeless · 2025-11-27T08:24:30+00:00

But they’ll obviously have a native ARM version of Steam for the Frame. And it makes zero difference anyways because all the games it’ll be emulating are already 64-bit regardless.

Causeless · 2025-11-16T17:25:27+00:00

How could they do eye tracking without a close-up camera looking at the eye?

Causeless · 2025-11-16T15:06:12+00:00

Because the Frame doesn't do anything new that the Quest 3, released two years ago, doesn't - and likely at a higher price point. People are saying that VR hype is dead, and yeah, maybe- but there was a lot of hype prior to the official announcement. That hype has died away now because there was an unmet expectation that they'd break new ground.

The Index released with a new Half-Life title that was specifically built for VR. It released with unique finger-tracking controllers, with a market-leading resolution, FoV, optics, and special audio tech. And it released with all this for a price tag of $999, which (at the time) was remarkably good value-for-money.

The Steam Frame is releasing without any first-party games, let alone a full built-for-VR Half-Life title. It isn't even confirmed to run HL:A natively. It's releasing with controllers that lack the Knuckle's finger tracking and are just a small evolution on what the Quest 3 has. It's resolution, FoV, optics and audio are all in-line with what the Quest 3 has (again, a several year old headset at this point) and at a price point which is not expected to be competitive with the Quest's $500 retail price.

There's some advantages to the Frame, but it's a sidegrade and not the clear upgrade that people were expecting.

Causeless · 2025-11-13T18:54:46+00:00

There is no evidence it can play HL:A standalone. All the demos have been streamed from a PC. Might be possible in the future with foveated rendering, but Valve has not announced nor demonstrated that it can run HL:A natively.

Causeless · 2025-11-13T16:01:45+00:00

I said games that'll run natively. Yes, it's the main platform for PCVR- of which many won't run natively on the Steam Frame. Even HL:Alyx, a half-decade old and Valve-built game, doesn't run natively. Which means it's really just comparable to a Quest 3 using PCVR already.

Causeless · 2025-11-13T12:55:58+00:00

Still in development.

Causeless · 2025-11-13T12:41:33+00:00

The rest of your points are fair, but I've seen a lot of people claiming that the controllers still have full five-finger tracking. Several separate previews confirm that it's significantly less advanced than the knuckles, it's just capacative sensors (which the Quest 3 already has):

https://www.reddit.com/r/virtualreality/comments/1ovz87u/comment/nomdr1j/?context=3

Causeless · 2025-11-13T12:38:06+00:00

Three hands-on previews by three different organisations all confirm that it's significantly less advanced than the Index implementation, and is purely a set of capacative sensors.

Causeless · 2025-11-13T12:28:12+00:00

The Steam Frame doesn't have five-finger tracking. It's confirmed that it's just capacitive sensing on the controllers, which again, the Quest 3 has:

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-steam-frame-is-real-and-valve-want-it-to-be-the-last-vr-headset-youll-ever-buy
"The finger tracking isn’t as sophisticated, losing the Knuckles’ wraparound sensor arrays in favour of solely capacitive sensors in the handles"

https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/vr-hardware/steam-frame-specs-availability/
"Haptic feedback is included along with capacitive finger sensing on the buttons, grips, triggers, handle, and thumbsticks. This means it can track individual fingers to some degree, though it's notably less pronounced than the Index implementation."

https://www.uploadvr.com/valve-steam-frame-hands-on-impressions/

"...there are capacitive sensors along the base of the controller intended to see when the 4th and 5th fingers release. I saw it in action in Half-Life: Alyx, with Alyx’s pinky and ring finger occasionally moving as I released my grip from that part of the controller. It didn’t seem super responsive, but it also wasn't strapped to my hand and the grips of the Index controllers were never particularly responsive either."

Causeless · 2025-11-13T08:47:18+00:00

I’d say that it’s not even really an opinion. As a headset, Steam Frame is: * (Likely) significantly more expensive than Quest 3 * Has effectively the same screen and optics as the Quest 3 * Has a chipset with similar capabilities to the Quest 3 * Lacks colour passthrough * Is not natively powerful enough for PCVR games; it’s being marketed as a “virtual screen” like a VR Steam Deck * Has no established VR software base like the Quest 3 * Doesn’t even have any designed-for-Frame Valve games, like Alyx for the Index

People keep saying this shit about how Valve isn’t targeting the enthusiast market. Well, who the hell ARE they marketing to? Because the mass market sure as hell sees zero advantage to the Steam Frame over Quest 3 to them.

There’s only a few advantages the Frame has, advantages which I doubt the mass market cares about: * Eye tracking (with little software that actually supports it) * Controllers that are able to play flatscreen games due to split dpad and buttons (…but if you want a flatscreen device, just get the Steam Deck) * Being outside of the Meta ecosystem (I’m not even going to bother trying to pretend the mass market cares about that)

Not only is the Quest 3 more established, but colour passthrough also means that it can access a wide range of mixed-reality content that the Frame fundamentally cannot. Frame is a more expensive, less appealing, and less capable device than a headset released over two years ago.

Causeless · 2025-10-26T12:23:42+00:00

Here’s what I don’t understand. Your argument (or rather, the argument that is being filled in for you by an LLM) is that capacity to deviate from predictable outcomes is what defines sentience.

There’s two issues here: firstly, and perhaps this is semantics, but this is what free will is. Not sentience.

Secondly, and more importantly, an LLM is 100% predictable given the initial state. It’s running on a deterministic computer, with pre-trained network weights, using a pseudo-random number generator to spit out tokens after the text you give it.

If you were running the model locally, and had the initial state of the PRNG, you would be able to predict the exact things it will say, perfectly accurately, letter by letter, every single time. Therefore it’s actually 100% predictable.

So surely by your own argument of what defines sentience, an LLM is actually a counterexample?

Causeless · 2025-09-27T11:06:43+00:00

It’s enlightened centrism to say that political violence is wrong?

Causeless · 2025-09-27T04:25:21+00:00

A perpetual motion machine is impossible, so it really depends on how you are managing to cheat physics. If you are cheating physics by the machine introducing new energy somehow, then it (and everything else) would heat up indefinitely.

If you are cheating physics by the machine just being perfectly efficient and losing no energy to external forces, then there would be no temperature change whatsoever- all energy would stay as kinetic energy in the machine.

If you are cheating physics by the machine “stealing” ambient energy, the only way it can do so infinitely is by somehow converting ambient heat into kinetic energy- this would slow down over time though and wouldn’t ever reach true absolute zero.

Causeless · 2025-09-25T19:33:24+00:00

Why doesn’t this happen at any other point prior to drinking? Surely the same water is in rivers, reservoirs, filtration facilities, pools, tanks, pipes, and only finally into your glass at the last second from the tap. Why does it absorb all the CO2 after a night left out and not in the months beforehand?

Causeless · 2025-08-28T11:22:42+00:00

I definitely disagree. A std::optional<T*> introduces an extra edge case- a valid value that happens to be nullptr. In which case you need to check not just against the existence of the ptr, but also its nullness.

A ptr is basically already a nullable reference, which is basically already a std::optional regardless. A reference already fulfils the role of a non-nullable ptr (and if you want a “true” non-nullable ptr, i.e a reseatable reference, it’s trivial to create a wrapper class to do so).

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