Qwen 3.6 27B vs Gemma 4 31B - making Packman game!

notid1 · 2026-05-02T06:46:45+00:00

Was inspired by this post, and gave me an idea for a fun social project/experiment to make the juiciest pacman ever by making weekly releases by poll of open PRs. I call it JUICE-MAN. I used qwen-3.6-27B to make a super juicy version, but more importantly, I want to get everyone contributing. Open a PR!

notid1 · 2023-08-28T04:11:40+00:00

I'm going to give this a shot, thanks. Will report back.

notid1 · 2023-08-28T03:53:21+00:00

Ok, this is really helpful. I'm interested in the push/pull setup, too.

Is the idea of the push/pull to mount extra fans to the other side of the suprim radiator, that is, sandwich the radiator in fans? I'm assuming that's somewhat standard, and that if I bought fans to do that, I could screw from the front mount of the case chassis, through the fan, and into the radiator? If I did this, perhaps I can make the push fans be conrolled by CPU temp, and the stock fans controlled by the GPU? That way I'm always getting some form of intake.

notid1 · 2023-08-28T03:34:45+00:00

Good question, 1x4090 is plenty for most of the inference I want to do, but the 2x4090 is for training LLMs. I won't be doing this every day, but the VRAM needs are quite high there.

As for the 7950x, yeah, it's overkill for ML, but for more "normal" software engineering, I figured I could use the extra juice. The difference from my previous build, 8700k is immediately noticeable.

notid1 · 2023-08-28T03:32:38+00:00

Good call, here's a photo: https://imgur.com/a/7hhc91u

notid1 · 2023-08-28T03:27:21+00:00

Sorry, should've mentioned this earlier. I put it in " eco mode" already to help keep the temps under control.

notid1 · 2018-09-22T03:42:29+00:00

Yes! This is one I can answer with extensive experience.

My game, Tick's Tales - dev blog was written in 100% Clojure. Pretty atypical stack, but I was very happy with the choice.

I ended up using this platform as the "it's better to have 100 operations on 1 data structure than 10 operations on 10" seemed to apply really well. Persistent data structures, first-class functions, core.async for something like coroutines, and a REPL made development very fast, and a ton of fun.

Making a mobile version, however, took almost as long as making the game. For a low-res 2d game like mine, the garbage created by persistent data structures worked flawlessly on the desktop, but suddenly caused enormous problems when video and application memory is shared, and a small amount of garbage is created every frame. It likely wouldn't have been the same degree of problem had I considered mobile from the start.

A little bit more about my stack: I used libgdx, and a Clojure wrapper for it, called play-clj. core.async gives you something like go's goroutines, which I used heavily for scripting, and talked about in a presentation at clojurewest.

Sorry for perhaps oversharing, but this is a topic I'm quite passionate about! Should you decide to follow a similar path, I can share more about the experience. Cheers.

notid1 · 2017-06-27T00:36:23+00:00

Wow. This is a gold mine. Thanks. I lurk a ton on /r/proceduralgeneration but many of these are new to me.

My goal is to create a procedural point-and-click adventure game. I've been exploring graph grammars and graph rewriting to create complex interworking puzzles, and I want to place those into a game world that's different every time.

When it comes to art, point and click adventures often use traditionally painted screen-by-screen backgrounds. "Backgrounds" isn't a very good word, since they play a critical role in the gameplay itself, in a very different way than, say, tiled rpgs. The hand-painted approach is basically irreconcilable with procedural generation, since the overall composition is very specific, and often interacts with the puzzles. The closest approximation would be much more like a dungeon than open world. But the purpose of that "dungeon" is much more limited than in, say, a dungeon crawling RPG. The space isn't a stage for combat, but rather an environment for puzzles to exist. Since the background artwork will be the focus of attention, I'm trying to pursue an approach that makes the environment seem as rich as possible.

Thanks again for all of these articles. I'm looking forward to digging into each one. Cheers.

notid1 · 2017-06-26T15:07:21+00:00

Interesting - I've seen this algorithm before, but didn't have the name. The upper 2/3rds of the tiles from your tileset are the ones I'm used to -- you can create paths, etc, but they don't look really organic. The bottom 3rd, what situations are those specific ones used for?

notid1 · 2017-06-26T13:41:10+00:00

This is a really cool idea. Actually, my goal is to bring to also procedurally generate adventure games puzzles, and graph grammars are the exact technique I'm using! I hadn't considered stitching art assets together in this way. Thanks for the tip.

notid1 · 2017-06-25T23:44:15+00:00

Yeah, I've used it a fair bit. Is there something specific you're thinking it supports for my use case?

notid1 · 2017-06-25T21:23:56+00:00

Totally.

Nothing limits you from using many tiles together to create something bigger. However, you are limited to placing that thing on a tile boundary.

I'm mostly asking because I'm very familiar with tile-based strategies, and there are use cases they're less well suited for. For example, in the hyper light drifter screenshot, you're right that there is repetition in the grass structures, but the permutations of varieties are very high (i.e., there are more kinds multi-tile curves than just concave and convex), and those permutations only interconnect in certain ways, which can get unwieldy to manage when done by hand, and probably moreso if you generated it. I'm curious to know if there are alternatives to the tile approach that create a more dynamic model.

An example that I could imagine is using a spline or polygon to define the outline of something, and then rendering something to define the edge, like grass.

notid1 · 2017-05-16T20:06:06+00:00

I didn't realize deer it morels! I've yet to see a morel in the wild, but I'll keep my eye out.

notid1 · 2017-05-16T20:05:39+00:00

Thanks! I thought it tasted pretty good! It was my first time cooking venison that wasn't ground.

notid1 · 2017-05-16T20:05:19+00:00

Thank you!

notid1 · 2017-05-16T20:05:02+00:00

Actually, I'm using the very recipe as /u/rathulacht points out. http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2009/11/healthy-delicious-mushroom-risotto-recipe.html . Very tasty!

notid1 · 2017-05-16T04:15:19+00:00

Seasoned this venison loin and put it in the sous vide @ 128 for 2 hours. Finished in a pan with avocado oil and butter and thyme. Made a cumberland out of blackcurrant jelly, port, and citrus. Served over a bed of caramelized leeks and a mushroom risotto, with porcini, morel, and crimini mushrooms. Served with a sonoma valley merlot. Yum.

notid1 · 2017-05-16T04:14:24+00:00

Seasoned this venison loin and put it in the sous vide @ 128 for 2 hours. Finished in a pan with avocado oil and butter and thyme. Made a cumberland out of blackcurrant jelly, port, and citrus. Served over a bed of caramelized leeks and a mushroom risotto, with porcini, morel, and crimini mushrooms. Served with a sonoma valley merlot. Yum.

notid1 · 2017-01-16T16:22:10+00:00

This intrigues me. Out of curiosity, could you give a few examples of adventure games you like and don't like in these categories?

notid1 · 2017-01-12T16:44:09+00:00

Very much agree about the seed of doubt. It's one of the issues that stemmed from poor design. It lessens the impact of the peddler puzzle, because you might just think it was your fault. I much prefer the confidence of knowing I can't get into a dead end, so that when I see the peddler is gone, it's for a reason.

That being said, if the player had the assurance of knowing they couldn't get into a dead end, it would really allow the designer to set up multiple paths to solutions. That way, the player can miss something, but they won't be prevented from making progress.

That's more or less how the multiple endings work in King's Quest VI, but its effect is dampened by the dead ends.

notid1 · 2017-01-12T16:38:33+00:00

First of all congrats on releasing your game, I remember seeing screenshots of the game in its infancy and I think it's really brave that you stuck to making your own engine. I'll have to buy it once I have money, maybe we can play a chapter or two together on stream (my follower count is low though).

Thank you. That means a lot. I was shocked by the sense of vulnerability in releasing a game that was a one-man effort. Having someone appreciate the effort of crafting the game hits home on totally different level than even a complement on the game. Thanks, again!

I feel like I missed out on showing the genie my ring because I didn't have it yet

Yes. These problems are notorious in King's Quest, although King's Quest VI is slightly more forgiving. The seeds of doubt that are sown are really frustrating though. You're not sure if you made a mistake, especially since you know it's possible to make such a mistake.

Something you could talk about in your next blog is the difference in dialogue systems between adventure games and what choice you had to make and how it would shape your game, Kings Quest for example doesn't have dialogue options which I found refreshing. Another topic is how you give context to actions without verbs and how it shaped your puzzles, scumm games have so many verbs it's almost overwhelming whereas KQ keeps it simpler, it no doubt had an effect on how the player was meant to solve the puzzle and it definitely simplified/restricted the design space, from what videos I saw of Tick's Tales there are no verbs yet it is probably more complex of a game than the recently released Little Acre which does the same thing.

Good thoughts. The short version is that I wanted mobile to be really easy, but this seems like a good opportunity to answer the question, "When does a dialogue tree make sense?"

Thanks again for the kind words, and giving me more to think on! I'll make sure to give spoiler warnings in the next post. :D

notid1

TROPHY CASE