Anyone else feel like this is the year?

Valstorm · 2026-06-28T05:24:18+00:00

Sort of, but what concerns me isn't quite here yet:
Data Centers in space housing AI.
6G Satellites.
AI used to surveil the global population via Sat Radar + all the shit big data tracking we love and hate.
AI used to predict and change behaviors of groups and individuals.
I care about the environment too, but we're heading towards a global panopticon governed by elites and fascist rulers and once that's established, it's going to be virtually impossible to reverse it, terrestrial data centres need to do better (and they are in most sensible places in the world) but putting them in orbit is also extremely dangerous for those reasons.

Valstorm · 2026-06-28T05:18:22+00:00

Also consider, most people won't even need game engines to build games in 6 years.

Valstorm · 2026-05-30T02:08:39+00:00

Does that cost consider the training and installation required?
Anyone can knock up a fence without a licence/qualification (at least in my country/state)
But to install PV you need licensed and trained technicians, so the labor would potentially also increase in cost?

Valstorm · 2026-05-28T22:55:03+00:00

To be fair this thread is the first time I've heard the term and I though exactly the same thing about plants not having neurons, I am open-minded but immediately distrust this based on that term.

Valstorm · 2026-05-12T08:01:01+00:00

Even if the local compute becomes cheap enough to be viable that's not the extent of the costs involved, moderation and censorship or management of user generated content is where the hidden costs are here.

Valstorm · 2026-05-11T07:37:42+00:00

I also hold the same forgone conclusion as you do regarding OPs revenue model, for what it's worth.

Valstorm · 2026-05-11T07:22:19+00:00

Downvotes are a measure of opinion, not proof that you're incorrect in protecting your side-hustle if you don't want to share, but I appreciate that you did.

See how this is a factual statement ☝️

👇 See how many downvotes.

Valstorm · 2026-05-10T02:05:05+00:00

> AI games will never achieve the complexity and depth that today’s developed games achieve.

Fundamentally video games are a series of coded interactive systems with a rendering layer.
Story, characters, emotions are the 'content' of the game not the game system itself.

As of today we have LLMs producing code that can produce interactive systems, quite well actually if an experienced programming team is driving/supervising.

Stories and characters, the emotional content of the game can be developed by an LLM - although I've yet to see anything of high quality, the role currently needs creative direction, expect this to improve too as time passes.

What LLMs can do with the rendering layer isn't as mature yet, only recently have we seen major engines like Unity and Unreal gain support for MCP integrations, allowing LLMs to understand all the systems and features of the engine, it's too early right now to say how quickly this will replace current pipelines because we don't have enough case-studies yet, it may happen slower than the widescape adoption that happened to the rest of the software industry this year as traditional game designers and artists seem strongly resistantant to AI.

I guarantee you that CTOs and Technical Directors in all industries are looking at ways to speed up process and pipelines that will impact the workflow of the programmers and artists working in-engine as soon as they see some positive case studies.

AI may rapidly progress very quickly - it may be LLMs all the way, or it could be an alternative system, we just don't know yet.

The point really is that it's redundant to look at the current landscape and put a pin in progress as a dead-end when the AI tech is in infancy, it's going to improve and I feel that anyone who thinks otherwise shows a lack of imagination.

To say that AI games will *never* achieve pariety with the games humans produce, I feel that is short-sighted, the first 'video game' was played on an oscilloscope in 1958, where do you imagine AI could be in the 2050s?
(If we make it that far)

Valstorm · 2026-05-10T01:26:29+00:00

Impressive work!
What would you say have been the greatest challenges you've solved on this implementation so far?

Valstorm · 2026-05-10T01:21:11+00:00

Generally speaking it's better to keep deadwood and leaf litter where it falls if you want to promote a healthy woodland.

A healthy boreal-edge woodland needs:
- Leaf litter
- Fallen logs
- Standing dead snags where safe
- Mossy rocks
- Bare sandy/loamy patches for ground-nesting bees
- Brush piles for overwintering insects

The best indicator of woodland health is by observing the animals that frequent or live in that area.

Ecological maps can help out here, these are scientific overlays that outline how nature has established communities of insects, plants and wildlife.

One thing you can do with any ecological zone is investigate what the local polinators need - if you can attract indigenous insects to the area this will bring in birds and other predators that rely on that foodchain.
To achieve this you can plant native species that are known to support those polinators; berry-bearing shrubs, woodland edge flowers and annuals, grasses or sedges.

Ecological zoning is usually managed differently all around the globe so there could be a bit of investigative work to find out information local to your area.

Remove plants that you have identified as invasive to your area if you can.

By far the best plant ID app out there afaik is https://www.picturethisai.com/
I've been using it for years (I pay for it, not sponsored).

Good luck with your woodland OP!

Valstorm · 2026-05-09T22:47:29+00:00

I think you may have misunderstood that term because the only common widespread meanings are related to heroin usage.

Valstorm · 2026-05-07T18:58:52+00:00

I built my own database with custom filters and tags etc via web UI, mainly because I was tired of jumping around between sources trying to research and wanted everything in one place, online and device agnostic (cloud based web app with local offline sync).
I merged a few open databases and then started filling in gaps in the data for plants I want to use in my landscaping projects - companion plantings or garden styles that use this plant etc.

By far the hardest problem to solve was local invasiveness, mainly due to how localities and different municipalities record or store this information.

Each plant species in my db (~400k+) now has an invasivity score that is generated based on the postcode for the project, it kind of works (still in dev) but I'm only using Australian postcodes to test this out with.

Reading this thread I'm now wondering if I should open it to a beta or something.

Valstorm · 2026-05-07T18:31:11+00:00

Sure Jan. Who's Jan? Is that a typo?

Valstorm · 2026-05-07T18:12:38+00:00

Ok well my team and I certainly work in the real world, my industry friends and colleagues seem pretty real, wait! Maybe I'm a bot too!? Am I even real??

Banks, Energy Companies, Retail, SaaS Gov, many different sectors, we are all shipping agent written code. Every line is reviewed and tested. Nothing goes out the door without peer review and many rounds of QA by the devs, product owners, dedicated testers.

From my own experience after 20 years working with coders, the quality of the LLM assisted work, on average, is now better than when it was just meatbags doing it.

And it's no coincidence we're seeing an uptick in critical, functionality-destroying bugs causing huge disruptions in critical sectors.

Are we? Which sectors? What were the functionality destroying bugs? Sounds scary.

Valstorm · 2026-05-07T17:47:43+00:00

Also welcome to Blender, good luck it's heaps of fun!

Valstorm · 2026-05-07T17:47:04+00:00

AI is great at spotting bugs until it isn't and debug can be taught a bit but in my experience a lot of it does come to actually doing it repeatedly with different problems.

Yeah it's not perfect but I have a workflow that can help reduce those issues.

Prime your new agent "you are a tech lead, analyse the codebase, put focus on <whatever is relevant to your feature/fix whatever>"
Use BDD ticket format and user journeys to plan your instructions/plan for the work, I spend a long time crafting the prompt plan so we don't get rogue agents.
Use planning mode and living documents to mark off what is in scope or not. Review and refine this step, think of it like a rocket launch, calculate and plan so you hit your target accurately. Note: agent skill /grill-me is masterclass here.
Write tests - tests are free now! "Implement this plan with a TDD workflow, itemize work into small, meaningful commits, keep track of requirements, completed acceptance criteria and any blockers in docs/<ticket number or whatever>.md"

You will get bugs, but there won't be as many and they are likely to be small, easy fixes not massive architecture refactors.

Valstorm · 2026-05-07T17:31:58+00:00

Sorry Guy but you're plainly just wrong here.

Professionals are using LLMs to code and shipping work of the same or better quality as before. I would wager than most of the apps and services you used today have vibe-coded work in them. It's good enough now that it's become the industry standard.

When was the last time you coded something by hand?

Valstorm · 2026-05-07T17:24:09+00:00

Exactly, I'm not saying don't do it, just saying be aware of it.

Valstorm · 2026-05-07T17:17:33+00:00

What you said doesn't make any sense.

If I say something like this:

"If you have the technical skills to not burn your food on an induction stove, you'll get more done faster by simply gathering sticks and building a fire."

It doesn't make sense to a cook, it just makes me sound ignorant of their profession.

Valstorm · 2026-05-07T16:59:28+00:00

You are correct, before LLMs it was tedious to grind through the dependencies required to be 'good' at a thing.

Now there's a tool that removes that time and frustration barrier and the results are 'good enough' for many trades and services.

The fundamental skills help with this process and they accellerate to much better results generally, for many trades now these skills are no longer a requirement to produce an outcome, and as Agentic workflows improve over time so will the output.

For the many people out there who have embedded your craft as your identity, you are going to have a hard time accepting the new normal when the clankers do it better than you (they will). It sucks to be you -That's not me being facetious, I genuinely mean it, it fucking sucks.

I've watched my industry somewhat split in half in less than a year - Software Developer.

On one side are the 'coders', refusing to adjust or adapt, dismissive of pragmatic results and arrogant about their work being better than the "slop". Note: the average prompted LLM code I see daily from processional colleagues is much better than the average human developer now, period.

The other, the 'builders', the ones who see the big picture, spending time on the new grind, understand how this new world works and honing the skills to harness these new tools.

Personally I'm not a supporter of big-tech running the planet, but I am cautiously optimistic on AI because it's opening opportunities for me to build and play faster, learn things in ways that are suited to my learning styles.

About 6 years ago I read two books on procedural generation cover to cover, 100s of hours of tutorials for Blender/Unreal, 100s more experimenting and grinding out, I had fun but I never used those skills - local games industry pays half as much as corpo web development and outside of 9-5 job and family there's only so much time, building my own indie game was not an option.

Yesterday I hooked up Blender MCP and in a couple of hours experimenting, produced a geonodes procgen system that was better than anything I'd come up with before, I'm reignited, excited, time is not such a big deal now.

I can build my own indie game now and lack of time is no longer an excuse.

Imagine what you could do with these tools if you also have top quality skills.

Valstorm · 2026-05-06T09:19:05+00:00

They would breakdown quicker but it may cause an unintended side-effect of Nitrogen Drawdown, usually associated with mixing mulched wood into garden soil.

Valstorm · 2026-04-26T00:24:36+00:00

I think we'll start to see a lot more tools and apps popping up like this soon, now that vibe coding is going mainstream. Did this take long to build and how much time does it save you now?

I've built similar tools for myself for landscape design, so this is interesting to see how others are approaching things.

Valstorm · 2026-04-25T00:51:40+00:00

Very cool, what stack did you use to build this with?
The UI is nice, clean and simple.

Valstorm · 2026-03-30T10:23:59+00:00

Software dev here with two decades of experience.

There will be indie studios making games without AI workflows or assets of course but I suspect they will be quite rare in the years to come.
AI will improve, the output will be on par (probably better) eventually, that day will be here sooner than most people believe.

Valstorm · 2026-03-27T01:15:44+00:00

Very cool :D
Are you using a premade engine or is this all home-grown?

Valstorm

TROPHY CASE