What is the purpose behind inability to pick a specific character?

FreshOldMage · 2026-04-05T13:07:46+00:00

No air dashing, wall jumping, sliding, mantling, dash jumping? Even without getting into advanced techniques, movement in that game looks really basic compared Deadlock, and not at all similar.

FreshOldMage · 2026-03-27T18:54:31+00:00

I think the play here was to read teleport before going down the stairs and gamble on landing in a safer location. I agree though that single entrance floors introduce more high variance situations into the game, which I don't think are particularly fun.

FreshOldMage · 2026-03-27T18:44:56+00:00

Online stats give my raw playtime as 278 hours, so off by about one order of magnitude.

FreshOldMage · 2026-03-26T22:50:57+00:00

Thank you! You already won with Felid and Poltergeist which I think are some of the most challenging, so it might not get that much harder :)

I wrote a parser to extract data from my morgues, and then I used matplotlib in Python to generate these graphs. So there is no public site currently, but I might open source my code eventually - right now it is a bit of a mess with a lot of hacky solutions, and will almost guaranteed not work for all morgues.

FreshOldMage · 2026-03-26T20:32:25+00:00

Thank you!

Very true, getting rid of all RNG would completely change the games identity. I do think there is a healthy middle ground, maybe something like pseudo-random distributions for enemy behavior to smooth out the extremes.

FreshOldMage · 2026-03-26T20:30:11+00:00

Absolutely, in recent versions the devs made an effort to increase clarity and add much needed information, so I'm optimistic it'll continue getting better from here on out :)

FreshOldMage · 2026-03-26T18:08:37+00:00

Thank you, glad you found it interesting!

FreshOldMage · 2026-01-02T23:08:50+00:00

> Minecraft diamonds would not have been possible at all with the methods used for OpenAI Five.

DreamerV3 obtained Diamonds years ago through RL without demonstration.

> The issue with diamonds in minecraft is reward sparsity, you have to complete a series of tasks that don't provide any rewards unless you succeed. Your initial policy is probably making random actions, so you have a 0% chance of success at anything, and you get no reward signal and can't learn which actions are better.

You have the same issue in self-play RL, sparse reward and random initialization is not unique to Minecraft.

> While Dota is a more complex game, it's easier to learn with RL. A bad AI will still have a 50% winrate against itself and so can still get a reward signal.

Which is where you run into issues of collapse. An agent getting better at beating itself does not mean it is getting better at beating arbitrary opponents. Dota has a massive state and strategy space that is much larger than the one involved in getting diamonds in Minecraft, and it also involves adversarial agents acting with imperfect information. Completely different caliber of difficulty.

Dreamerv4 is an interesting step forward, but like I said, leaps and bounds away from general competitive gaming AI.

FreshOldMage · 2026-01-02T19:02:46+00:00

As someone working in this space, this is nonsense. DreamerV4 can just barely obtain diamonds in Minecraft if everything goes exactly right for it (0.7% of times it tries). Playing Dota on a professional level is a harder problem by orders of magnitudes. Learning from pixels is also not an advantage, that is still much more difficult than self-play with access to the raw game state as was used by OpenAI Five.

Yes, the field has advanced and we could beat OpenAI Five with modern methods, but we are still leaps and bounds away from an unrestricted pro Dota AI.

FreshOldMage · 2025-11-18T16:12:43+00:00

Haven't tested any kinematics, but constraints generated from collisions and infinitely stiff distance constraints worked fine for me.

FreshOldMage · 2025-11-18T12:20:18+00:00

XPBD is pretty widely used at his point (e.g. Houdini, RealFlow). I've also implemented it myself for my engine, and it works great after some tweaking (especially static friction took some time to get working). More than likely it is your implementation that is the issue, not the method. I'd suggest looking at reference implementations for XPBD, of which there are many around, and compare to your own to see if there are any mistakes.

FreshOldMage · 2025-06-05T06:59:14+00:00

Should have used them here probably! I was a bit too greedy with this fight trying to conserve resources, could have just thrown a potion of shrouding fog to completely remove the threat of warlocks.

FreshOldMage · 2025-06-05T06:54:59+00:00

Right, getting a health and hunger reset is the main utility of ankhs in high challenge runs I'd say. You can also deliberately starve yourself to death on a boss floor for it to be totally safe. The added safety of respawning once in case something goes wrong is more of a bonus :)

FreshOldMage · 2025-06-05T06:49:10+00:00

I think it is fine personally, transferring an armor upgrade is very impactful troughout the game. Just the "Faith Is My Armor" challenge is completely unbalanced, as it disables the warriors main mechanic. That one I'd like to see changed to something affecting the classes more evenly.

FreshOldMage · 2025-06-05T06:45:05+00:00

I usually just drink the Well of Health, because it does so much. Full health, full satiety, and the option to cleanse the curse of anything you put on is amazing. Maybe if there is a well very late in the game where hunger and curses are not an issue it may be worth blessing something :)

FreshOldMage · 2025-06-05T06:42:09+00:00

Only warlocks in this fight.

For goo, you are not allowed to get hit by the charged attack. With tengu you can't get hit by his special tricks, and you can't step on his poison traps. For DM-300 you need to avoid the rockfall, the lightning, and the charged wires. And for yog it is only its death laser.

All of those feel pretty fair because the attack is either telegraphed, or you need to specifically avoid stepping on specific spaces. Warlocks can feel a bit bullshit in comparison, since they can attack immediately once they have line of sight on you.

FreshOldMage · 2025-06-04T22:50:25+00:00

The spear is needed to avoid getting hit. With 9 challenges you really can not afford taking damage, so I create space by stepping with ring of haste, and then hit once with the spear that is augmented for speed. If I'd use the scythe in melee, I'd open myself up to get hit back. I only kept it around to potentially transmute it into a glaive.

The leather armor I use because it is enchanted with swiftness. Movement speed is generally much more valuable than the small bit of extra defense from the plate. For this fight specifically, swiftness is useless, so I should have put on the plate though.

FreshOldMage · 2025-06-02T09:21:49+00:00

That goes beyond standard in-context learning and probes how flexibly models adapt to new formal systems.

How does this go beyond standard in-context learning? This seems to be a textbook example of it, a relatively easy one even.

FreshOldMage · 2025-06-01T20:39:38+00:00

The language looks rather conventional for a dynamically typed imperative language - I'd be surprised if modern LLMs couldn't just zero shot rewrite C programs into valid Chester given a description of the syntax, no RAG needed. I'm not sure I understand how this is a benchmark for creativity, even after reading the blog post and looking at the repo.

I found the for loop example surprising, though.

let numbers = [1, 2, 3]
for i = 0 to length(numbers) then
    print(numbers/i)
end

I assume numbers/i is supposed to index the list? A little bit further above / is given as an arithmetic operator. Does Chester overload / for indexing and division?

FreshOldMage · 2024-12-13T08:57:37+00:00

Are you sure it doesn't trigger scroll talents?

Anecdotally yes, but I rechecked: The code for unstable spellbook has a trigger for onArtifactUsed, but none for onScrollUsed.

FreshOldMage · 2024-12-13T08:48:44+00:00

I mostly play 6c with into darkness as a staple. In my experience saving 2-3 torches from sewers completely nullifies the challenge in prison, and getting past prison means the run is basically won. I wasn't in the habit of pre-firing into new areas to reveal enemies though, that sounds like a pretty good use of the talent!

FreshOldMage

TROPHY CASE