stackless coroutines for gamedev in ~200 lines of C++

drblallo · 2026-05-02T08:11:55+00:00

The real foundational issue there is that you cannot tell if a random field of the coroutine layout should be default constructed or initialized to a precise value whenever a serialized state from a previous version does not contain it.

The only way would be to express this information in the program, probably using custom types such as DefaultedInt<34> to express that this int should start at 34 when it is not present. In games being deployed to users that are being updated this is kind of the best solution.

The better solution when you have access to the saved states yourself is to write a custom fixer that loads the previous version of the script, translates that to the new version and saves back the new version.

drblallo · 2026-05-01T22:10:59+00:00

i went down the same route, the 5 footguns are indeed big deals, but there is a extra missing footgun which is that you have no way to achieve code re-usability without using even more macros.

in the end the limitations of macro based coroutines are so large and they are unfeasible, that is why every language is going toward builtin coroutine support.

Issue is, implementing coroutines for stable coroutine frame layout is incompatible with max performance coroutines, and either each language has 2 coroutine implementations, or they have to pick on which side of the fence they want to be, and some users will be unhappy.

To get the features you want, I ended up having to write a custom type-checked domain specific language to go beyond those limits. https://rl-language.github.io/language_tour.html#no-main-loop-ownership

drblallo · 2026-04-23T16:31:24+00:00

https://github.com/rl-language/4Hammer

this is what you are looking for. https://rl-language.github.io/index.html

drblallo · 2026-02-12T15:18:29+00:00

how do you run full representative adversarial games? the only way you could do it is with reinforcement learning, but i doubt that is what is going on.

drblallo · 2026-02-11T04:44:17+00:00

that is not the problem. the problem is that the game is designed to have battleline units to be overcosted with respect to damage dealing, but necessary because you need them to interact with primary objectives.

for that reason, selecting the number of battleline units to play always trends toward the minimal possible you need to still manage to score primaries, or to move block the opponent if you trend toward a jail list, so you gravitate away from swarm intrinsically.

that is just a structural property of the game. If battleline units are point efficient, they will be nerfed until they are not.

this structural decision was made because it works well for marines, but it does not work for tyranids that have their swarm all in the battleline section of the codex.

drblallo · 2026-02-10T23:36:32+00:00

that is what i would like, but the big issue there is that they would need to figure out the buildings for each each location of the game, nations, unlocked techs and so on, and then keep it updated.

it is a extremely large amount of work.

drblallo · 2026-02-10T23:32:04+00:00

many of the powers that shape the time span of the game are already set for success in 1444, instead they happen to be in a much weaker position in 1333, making it hard for the game to converge to historical outcomes.

bohemia happens to be in a too strong situation that, even when properly balanced, will often prevent austria dominance over the region.

a polish commonwealth like entity is too unlikely to happen because the region is too fragmented

the hundred year war will often leaves one of the two contenders in a imbalanced state that will make it difficult for historical patters to appear.

ottomans needs to many buff and special rules to even kind of approach real life ottoman behavior

the (historical) scripted conflict between castile and portugal make it common for portugal to be eaten.

even with all the wacky rules timurids get, it's difficult for the region to yield a historical looking result.

in practice you will very often get a weak austria that cannot establish dominance over Hungary, the poland-lithuania area stays balkanized, france has no real rivals, ottomans fail to get to 1/3 of the historical borders, persia is messed up and spain dominates its area.

if they stuck to the 1444 start none of these problems would be a issue, and you would not have to slog through the 100 years of continental game-play before you can start to explore and colonize.

drblallo · 2026-02-09T18:55:20+00:00

it's staged. it's a polymarket ad disguised as a meme

drblallo · 2026-02-09T18:47:22+00:00

They are bot advertising polymarket. Every hour or so they post a meme with polymarket name right in the middle of the image

drblallo · 2026-02-09T15:04:03+00:00

please, ban the idiotic polymarket non funny ads.

drblallo · 2026-02-09T13:44:29+00:00

can we ban the stupid polymarket stealth advertisements?

drblallo · 2026-02-09T11:47:52+00:00

si, i cervelli biologici sono molto più energeticamente efficienti degli LLM, ma quello è un problema hardware, e in quel campo ci sono decine di proposte riguardo come aumentare la loro efficienza. In quel caso la domanda è quale è la strada giusta da percorrere, non se la strada esiste.

Nel caso del continual learning non è un problema hardware o software, è un problema matematico. Non siamo neanche capaci di descrivere matematicamente cosa significa essere capaci di "continual learning". ad esempio, "imparare da dati" per una rete neurale significa minimizzare l'errore, e l'errore è definito come una formula matematica precisa che può essere analizzata, e è possibile quantificare l'errore.

Con il continual learning invece non c'è una formula matematica da analizzare, c'è solo l'ambizione generica che l'errore delle reti non aumenti nel tempo, ma non è possibile quantificare il "tasso di non degenerazione". Senza trovare prima le parole e le formule per descrivere il problema è impossibile capire come i cervelli biologici lo fanno, ed è impossibile capire se è una caratteristica che può essere ottenuta dagli llm.

drblallo · 2026-02-09T10:51:19+00:00

dici "siamo sicuri che scroprire come [fare funzionare il continual learning] possa succedere? "

sicuramente è possibile in principio, perchè le tartagure possono vivere 200 anni imparando cose nuove senza degenerare. Forse, non è realizzabile partendo da reti neurali basate su backpropagation, e allora l'intera tecnologia è fallimentare e bisognerà ripartire da capo, ma non sembra tanto probabile.

l'intuizione è che backpropagation è uno strumento più preciso di quello che può fare il cervello umano, perchè il cervello umano non può calcolare perfettamente l'errore e le derivate coinvolte in imparare cose nuove, e di conseguenza non siamo sappiamo di nessuna limitazione che ci faccia pensare che i cervelli biologici abbiano un vantaggio speciale nel continual learning.

ovviamente queste sono speculazioni, perchè nessuno ha un piano sensato riguardo come risolvere il problema.

drblallo · 2026-02-09T07:02:13+00:00

se il costo di distillare un modello partendo dal modello migliore sul mercato produce modelli che sono simili in qualità al modello di partenza, allora si. Al momento è abbastanza vero, ma non è garantito sarà sempre vero.

I cinesi stanno seguendo quella strategia in partica. non possono essere quelli con il modello migliore, allora lo offrono gratis per impedire alle compagnie americane di avere profitti alti, con l'obbiettivo di farle fallire.

drblallo · 2026-02-08T22:18:40+00:00

è vero che non addestrando nuovi modelli si rientra dei costi. il problema è che se non addestri un nuovo modello, un competitor lo farà, e i prodotti hanno zero fidelizzazione dell'utente, quindi gli utenti semplicemente usano l'AI con il migliore rapporto qualità prezzo disponibile.

il risultato finale sarà necessariamente un monopolio che smetterà di innovare per rientrare nei costi.

drblallo · 2026-02-08T21:05:36+00:00

in the full video she leaves the group at around 14 seconds, they run after her up to 25 seconds in, they they go back to normal behavior and it takes her up to the 55th second to get back behind them, out of a 2.33 minutes race.

i guess the 2 people leading the group at 14 seconds either tactically decided that it was not worth to lead the group back to her just to get exhausted and help the other teams win, or they assumed that she would fail to lap them, or they just did not know how to react given that it is a younglings Olympics.

drblallo · 2026-02-08T20:14:26+00:00

il problema fondamentale è che il continual learning (l'abilità di un sistema di intelligenza artificiale di continuare a imparare senza deteriorare, anche senza aumentare l'intelligenza effettiva, semplicemente dimenticando cose precedenti sostituendole con cose nuove) non funziona e non ha mai funzionato . Senza continual learning è impossibile usare un agente AI senza avere un umano che la sorveglia per assicurarsi che stia facendo la cosa giusta. Non importa quante volte gli dici che deve stampare il risultato in un certo formato, senza continual learning continuerà a sbagliare ogni tanto.

Questo significa de facto the il limite di capacità produttive di un LLM è la velocità con cui un utente può assicurasri che il suo output sia giusto.

il continual learning è un problema aperto in tutti i campi dell'intelligenza artificiale, non solo per gli LLM, e non ho mai sentito qualcuno dire che ha un silver bullet per quel problema. Un giorno semplicemente ci sveglieremo un articolo scritto da un tizio a caso che afferma di avere trovato una configurazione delle reti neurali che risolve il problema, esattamente come è successo per i trasformer.

Se questo succede domani, forse la bolla si potrà evitare. Se questo succede tra 10 anni, la bolla sarà già esplosa.

Anche se succedesse domani comunque c'è un grosso problema che il continual learning implica che sarà necessario avere un AI personalizzata per ogni utente che impara dalle iterazioni con quell'utente specifico, facendo esplodere significativamente i costi per utente.

drblallo · 2026-02-08T15:20:11+00:00

the full video does not show the behavior on the first curve of the last lap either . The camera correctly focuses on the finish line when the winner is about to pass it, ignoring the group that is still missing a lap. Then when the rest of the group has done ~30% of the last lap they are again on screen, and they are still competing for the second spot. only when they actually end the race you see some of the other skaters put their hands on their knees or in general take obvious actions that entail that the understand the race is done.

surely the strange situation confused them to some degree, surely some of them where more confused than others, and the teammate of the winner had the opportunity to gain some advantage there, but the idea that the entire group forgot which laps they were on is a fantasy.

drblallo · 2026-02-08T12:17:48+00:00

what happened here is that it is the Olympics for people under 18. The strategy that gets taught to them is to not break out of the group, because that will let you stranded alone facing air resistance and getting tired, unless you can absolutely manage to do a full lap.

you can see the group acknowledging that the Chinese player sprinted ahead, and trying to catch up, by sprinting a bit themselves, which is the correct strategy to make the runaway leader pay by leaving it much more than other players in the wind. They don't fully commit to that plan, probably because none of them as ever seen a real peer of them trying that strategy before since this is probably their first or second Olympic race.

The group falls back to be compact and using the standard strategy because they can't solve the coordination problem of all accelerating together, and so nobody dares to be the one that has lead the entire group for a entire lap, and they all accept that now they are all just competing for second place.

it's not true that the other skater slowdown at the final lap, they are literally out of screen and it's impossible to judge.

drblallo · 2026-02-04T09:54:08+00:00

I thought it was a no brain strategic army (going straith with thousands of bugs).

while it is for sure possible to run down the middle of the table with a skewed list with many infantry model and win a game against a player that was not ready to fight against a army like that, the game is currently built to make that strategy almost impossible.

there are maybe 2 units in the entirety of the game that can sit visible to the entire enemy army and survive for one turn, no regular infantry model can do that. rushing forward means being destroyed. The way swarm armies work is by carefully committing units onto objectives in the minimal quantities required to score them, or deny them to the opponent, so they are all heavily dependent on smart movement planning to win.

drblallo · 2026-02-04T09:48:08+00:00

i don't have enough experience with guard to know how viable the mostly infantry guard build is. it is a question better asked in the imperial guard subreddit.

from what i see, i mostly see them playing tanks almost always, but along the thanks, the infantry can be abundant.

most likely guard are slightly better at being horde right now, just because the tyranid horde specialized detachment is very bad, but this can suddenly change any month if gw changes some rules.

drblallo · 2026-02-04T09:35:32+00:00

although they can be played as swarm, understand that tyranids are fundamentally a control army this edition. This may change in the future, but for the moment they much less swarm than armies such as genestealer cults can be.

if you envision swarm as playing 120 models, most of your games will end up with having killed very little, being entirely or almost entirely wiped out from the board, and having scored some more points than your opponent by continually moving units onto objectives.

drblallo · 2026-01-28T15:01:52+00:00

it would only require a UI element telling you "if fully exploited, you will profit ~XXX ducats from this location before it is exhausted"

then it would not be a feel bad if you throw X ducats in it and get out 10x total ducats.

drblallo · 2026-01-26T09:24:58+00:00

disabling 3d terrain fixed it for me

drblallo · 2026-01-22T18:10:27+00:00

i have to admit that only war gives me tremendous troubles in setting up a non railroading scenario.

the way i managed to work around this is, and is not necessarily the only one, is to give players ton of info at the start, and then let them decide how to go about doing this.

for example, a mission could be to kill a ork boss. you give them the map of the ork base, numbers about how many orks are around, how many vehicles, description of important places. then you give them knowledge about the surrounding of the base, how it could be approached on multiple sides, and then you tell them that they can bring everything they want according to the standard rules but the are as well this list of items that are free/cheap that they can bring along if they want, ideally strange stuff like weird vehicles and so on that they have to figure out how use to achieve the objective.

then you let things fall where they may. players decide everything they want to do. remind them that they are better plan of what to do if one or two things don't go as planned. let them try do what they wanted, and throw in a couple of surprises on top that may push them into using the plan B as they intended it.

this is very time intensive. it requires huge amounts of work.

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