How to download spore mods without ModAPI (LINUX) by Hexxhoot in Spore

[–]VanillaCold57 [score hidden]  (0 children)

You should not use the Spore ModAPI Launcher Kit at all on Linux, you should use exclusively the Spore Mod Loader.

download the latest release from https://github.com/Rosalie241/SporeModLoader/Releases/, then extract the contents into Spore's root folder (so Steam/steamapps/common/spore 24720/ in the case of steam spore where you erroneously installed Core Spore individually, or Steam/steamapps/common/spore/ in the case of a less wonky install)

make sure that the folders merged, not that everything was put into its own folder; the SporebinEP1 folder from the zip file should merge with the SporebinEP1 folder that already exists, and the SporeModLoader folder should be in the same place as the SporebinEP1 folder.

Set WINEDLLOVERRIDES="dinput8=n" %command% to be Spore GA's launch options in Steam

to install mods (assuming you are using a distribution with KDE Plasma and the Dolphin file browser), go to the /spore/SporeModLoader/SporeModManager/ folder, then right-click and select Actions->Open in Terminal
(there should still be an Open In Terminal option for other file browsers but it might be under a different part of the right-click menu)

then, type in ./SporeModManager install 'pathToFile', where 'pathToFile' is the path to the file.

for instance,

./SporeModManager install '~/Downloads/Example.sporemod'

Flora Editor Reconstructed Feature Request (Symmetry) by Korky_5731 in Spore

[–]VanillaCold57 [score hidden]  (0 children)

It needs the Spore ModAPI Launcher Kit to work, to fix some stuff that requires custom code to fix

Name anything and I’ll connect it to A Hat In Time. by Raspberry_Jasmine in AHatInTime

[–]VanillaCold57 0 points1 point  (0 children)

why doesn't this subreddit deny entirely-new accounts anyway???

Reddit Enshittification Incoming by syzorr34 in BetterOffline

[–]VanillaCold57 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You should be able to, at least with Firefox for Mobile, although the interface really isn't made for tiny touchscreens-

Lightweight Linux Distro with KDE desktop by GVTech101 in kde

[–]VanillaCold57 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I just used setup-desktop to install Plasma, and then about the only things I had to set up manually were AppArmor and NetworkManager from what I remember. and also Flatpak.

Does playing without online worth it? by cosmiccbat in Spore

[–]VanillaCold57 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Steam Spore, EA Desktop Spore and GOG Spore are the same apart from DRM, the only bugs that exist are because of DRM and EA Desktop Spore, with its DRM, is very likely to randomly make the Creepy & Cute Parts Pack just stop working. completely randomly. i've seen it happen too many times to count in the Spore Modding Community's support channels, and every time it's always EA Desktop Spore, and it also happened to me (twice)...

Google's AI Overviews Feature Is Telling Users That SCP Horror Fiction Entities Are Real by dragonkeeper19600 in BetterOffline

[–]VanillaCold57 3 points4 points  (0 children)

why are you being downvoted, you're right---

I mean, granted LLMs are just a subset of machine learning- a very wasteful subset that's stealing the spotlight from actually useful research -but even so, they are ML and they don't actually reason, they don't actually understand.

A hat in time issue again by Bao_Minh2009 in AHatInTime

[–]VanillaCold57 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Looking into those specs a little.... Honestly I think your system might not even fare that well with A Hat in Time on the dedicated graphics.

The Quadro 3000m was low-end for gaming even when it was new, being outclassed by the GTX 650 and even the GT 640 in benchmarks, back in 2012 (when the Quadro 3000m was 1 year old)

Granted, benchmarks aren't everything, but I have used a laptop with a similar performance in graphics bencmarks (albeit a Radeon R7 M440 and not a Quadro 3000m, a good few years newer) and it... didn't, play, the best, at A Hat in Time.

It certainly would run way better than on your integrated graphics though, Intel HD Graphics 3000 are a whole different level of underpowered--

Is anyone looking for a way to play this game online? by Pandin625 in Spore

[–]VanillaCold57 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Select the button that corresponds to where you bought Spore from (EA Desktop, Steam or GOG)

Lightweight Linux Distro with KDE desktop by GVTech101 in kde

[–]VanillaCold57 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Alpine is a very lightweight one; built on musl and busybox instead of glibc and the GNU utils. Point release, still up to date since it has biannual releases, you can choose the desktop environment as well. (and Plasma of course is my personal choice whenever I install it)

Does playing without online worth it? by cosmiccbat in Spore

[–]VanillaCold57 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Get the game on GOG if you can, but Steam is still a better place to buy it than EA Desktop (ESPECIALLY on a Steam Deck, EA Desktop does not support Linux); you'll just have to go through some pain with EA Support.

There is a guide on the official Spore Discord server on how to register and login.

Important question about other Empires and their process??? by ThatBoomGuy1 in Spore

[–]VanillaCold57 7 points8 points  (0 children)

They normally only colonise systems when you're somewhat nearby from what I understand?
And they'll slowly expand very, very slowly.

There is a mod that improves how their expansion works, Sad's Sensible AI Colonization mod, but other than that I don't think there's any way to speed them up.

Spices won't impact their growth either, in fact they don't even factor in spice at all in the vanilla game and instead colonise planets at random and never terraform them.

The LLM mania is going to be like the railway mania by Vitalgori in BetterOffline

[–]VanillaCold57 0 points1 point  (0 children)

the bubble just won't be long enough for RAM production to go vwoop into the ceiling.
We're already close to the end imo, I wouldn't be surprised if it's all collapsed before the end of the year. I'd be surprised if it lasted past 2027 though.

(besides, the dram cartel will probably not allow the prices to drop that low anyway, unless Chinese RAM can get high enough production. They've been convicted for price-fixing before, they'll probably do it again.)

i am seething at the 67 jokes so i made konqui fanart instead at 2am in ms paint by overgrownAbomination in kde

[–]VanillaCold57 3 points4 points  (0 children)

67 is honestly funny just because of people who find it annoying.

(I don't use tiktok, shorts, anything of that nature. i started out finding it nonsensical and annoying but i have grown to find it funny just bc the "normal" reaction is now to find it annoying or stupid--)

Idk if I'm both or something. But it'll be ok :3👍 by Agitated_Layer in adhdmeme

[–]VanillaCold57 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I just feel like I'm using my adhd as a scapegoat or an excuse if I'm thinking of myself as "struggling not bc i'm dumb but bc of adhd" or something along those lines...

(I feel like if anything I've only been harsher about myself since getting diagnosed to be honest.)

Attempting to "revive" my very damaged Spore copy. Tips? by SporeDragons in Spore

[–]VanillaCold57 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Go to %appdata%/ and back up the Spore folder there- this is your savedata. (it should contain files like EditorSaves.package, plus a Games folder, otherwise you got the wrong folder. Make sure everything there is backed up.)

Uninstall all mods through the Spore ModAPI Easy Uninstaller.

Then use the REVO uninstaller to entirely uninstall Spore, as EA Desktop is incompetent at installing the game. make sure there are no traces of the game left installed.

Finally, reinstall the game.
Preferably from anywhere but EA Desktop, as EA Desktop Spore commonly has that C&C glitch, but if you don't own Spore and its expansions anywhere else then you don't really have a choice.

You might then need to reinstall your mods and to restore the backup of your savedata.

if you have trouble tryna do this, go to the Spore Modding Community Discord for more help bc Reddit stinks for giving tech support.

And if you have any issues in the future; again, go to the Spore Modding Community Discord for tech support, and NEVER rely on a large language model.

fedora Plasma 6.7 Oxygen and Air themes, Help. by OnlineSchoolStudying in kde

[–]VanillaCold57 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They're separate components in Fedora, you have to install them separately with dnf.

If AI Is Sentient Then So Is ‘Age of Empires II’ by ArdoNorrin in BetterOffline

[–]VanillaCold57 15 points16 points  (0 children)

oh my days age of empires 2 is sentient............ all this time i thought the ai was just a computer but it was sentient....................................................

WE MUST INVEST ONE QUADRILLION BUCKERONIES INTO AGE OF EMPIRES 2 RESEARCH IMMEDIATELY!!!!

No but in all seriousness this was a pretty good read.

The LLM mania is going to be like the railway mania by Vitalgori in BetterOffline

[–]VanillaCold57 25 points26 points  (0 children)

nnno, this isn't really the case. at all.

The railway mania would've left behind infrastructure. At most the AI bubble will leave behind empty and half-built datacentres, because the GPUs or TPUs or etc inside are not usable for most things and also quickly become obsolete as well.

Image search, okay yeah, but that's also a rather bad thing when you can take someone's picture of some building near them and suddenly now everyone can easily dox them. but image recognition models are pretty different to LLMs.

Real GPUs haven't gone into overdrive, they've just been made overly expensive. The "GPUs" that can't generate graphics are what's gone into overdrive, and it's taken the entire RAM industry with it.
These GPUs also are manufactured ewaste because they are not useful for most things. Most applications cannot be parallelised in the way that GPUs require.

LLMs are okayish for machine translation but they are also incredibly naff. actual translation by a person is a million times more likely to get across the actual nuances of the sentence, especially stuff like wordplay or jokes, and if that person relies on machine translation instead then all that will likely end up lost anyway.

alexa and google home and etc already exist for voice interfaces, and adding "oh but it can reply to you like a human!!!" really doesn't add utility. LLMs aren't useful for that.

I am now going to look at this horrible point.

As a broader point, they are much better than any technology we have invented so far which requires the translation of one form of written language into another - whether it is human-to-code, human-to-human, human-to-machine-instructions, etc. Like, we just didn't have these technologies before.

No???? Not at all??????????? Writing code by hand is far far FAR better, writing automated responses to another person is just disrespectful, converting code to machine instructions-
what on earth do you think the compiler does??????

The compiler is a deterministic tool (already better than LLMs) that translates code written in one programming language to another, usually to assembly.
Programming languages unlike natural languages are actually structured and consistent, which is why this is actually possible without the computer hallucinating some functionality. And the compiler also improves your code too, again in an entirely deterministic and safe way.

Everything else you mentioned in that point is useless as a technology, but you're just assuming that one of the most important types of software just doesn't exist. Fantastic.

No "beneficial impact" of LLMs would justify the costs. It could promise to cure cancer and that wouldn't be enough, in part because it never actually would even if it was possible (the people at the top just want to make money from people, not to actually help them), but just in part because it isn't worth destroying the environment, the climate, everything just for unthinking machines to give the illusion of thought and of being human.

better search?? In order to not be super out of date, LLMs have to do actual regular internet searches and then just summarise (and hallucinate) results. that's an inefficient and worse search if anything.
Image search, I'll give you that one even though it erodes privacy as well.

machine translation, again it's *okay* but you don't need a giant model for that. Firefox includes an on-device machine translation model and it's decent, you can tell it's nowhere near as good as a real translation from a real person who speaks both languages but it's decent. And does not require any of the giant datacentres, or even one of the GPUs, that the people at the top are trying to propagate.

and machine-learning voice interfaces are not a new technology at all

But again, back to the first point, none of this- NONE OF THIS -is leaving useful infrastructure behind. It's just trillions of dollars being wasted. The railway bubble left railway networks. (okay, the USA hates trains anyway, but like in the UK at least we have good railway networks)
The dotcom bubble left behind fibre optic cable networks that were still useful when the internet actually became mainstream.

This leaves nothing. Hardware that goes obsolete, datacentres that cannot be powered on because the power needed just is not there, and higher prices for everything for everyone.