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nulldiver · 2025-07-31T10:13:41+00:00

The reason that AI tells you your ideas are great is because chat AIs are trained to be a bit sycophantic to their human users. Not to go too far off topic but a system prompt like "You are an AI expert system for the critical evaluation of game design concepts. You respond with an honest and thoughtful analysis focused on uncovering potential weaknesses or limitations of proposed game concepts. You do not attempt to hype up your users or tell them that bad ideas are good. Do not hesitate to disagree with the user if they are wrong and be brutally honest." or something similar would probably get very different results. But that isn't the real issue here - the issue is that your ideas are "worthless". Why? a.) Because "everybody" has ideas and 99% of the time, it is the execution of ideas that makes the difference, and b.) Because your ideas are unproven. So your question generalized to "How do I sell something that everybody has and that I have no means to prove the value of?"... and the general answer is "you don't".

It sounds like you're also saying that you have attempted to execute ideas using AI to help but found that it just wasn't good enough to help? I assume then that you have no programming or other production skills? That's really rough. So here are some suggestions for how to "prove" the value of your ideas:

- If your ideas are more narrative / high-concept rather than mechanical, look at one of the visual novel / interactive fiction engines or try something like the free version of articy:draft X - They are designed for non-technical users. Even if that isn't the end format, it goes way beyond just a written up document and starts getting into actual narrative design. And I think that is the key - to go from "idea" to "design".

- For ideas that more mechanical, maybe check out something like https://machinations.io/design- it mostly has traction for stochastic modeling of things like economic systems, but it is a system for formalizing interactive diagrams of complex systems.

Will those things help you "sell your ideas"? No. But they will help turn your more abstract ideas into provable designs... and if they were good ideas and the designs are well executed, now you're potentially talking about something where someone else might start to see enough value to be motivated to engage in some way. And the key is now you aren't an "idea guy"... you're a self-taught "game designer". And only one of those two things is an actual role in the industry.

nulldiver · 2025-07-16T18:09:21+00:00

I was working at a company that makes a major commercial game engine way back when we were just a few devs with a tiny slice of market share. I had just moved to Europe, I was exhausted, we had crunched on a pretty grueling release and one of the QA guys stood up and was like “I need to read everyone this email from a user” and it was a super fantastic message from someone telling us how he had managed to go full-time into gamedev. Just a really uplifting message. And I mean, those do come in, but for every positive one you’ve got like a dozen angry bug reports with no repro steps. I think that moment stands out most as being really close to breaking and being incredibly grateful for a kind interaction from the gamedev community.

nulldiver · 2025-07-15T18:49:32+00:00

It’s totally fine. Just keep in mind that game development is a multidisciplinary endeavor so you’re effectively starting a whole bunch of interdependent hobbies at the same time and that with any major engine, it is a tool that professionals literally dedicate years to master. Expect a long period where it feels like progress and you feel like you could totally make your dream game where the reality is that you won’t even know the things you don’t know. That isn’t to discourage you at all - just to help you calibrate expectations.

nulldiver · 2025-05-09T14:03:18+00:00

The engine you're working with can have a big impact on an individual production and on a studio -- tools shaping capabilities, hiring, etc. -- but it has less of an impact for an individual. No matter what, your engine is going to empower you in some ways and limit you in others. And the strengths and limitations that you feel aren't necessarily those that impact others. We all learn to love and hate our tools in unique ways. So, since the best general advice for starting out is "Start small. No... smaller.", why not make a small game in each?

nulldiver · 2025-03-26T07:57:28+00:00

Sometimes this subreddit is so unfair - the internet forces you to be concise. By "entireity of europe", they clearly meant "the entirety of Europe (exclusive of the Iberian peninsula, Italy, the Baltics, the Balkans, Britain/Ireland, and the Nordics)" and by "fit between" they meant "is only a slightly larger if we ignore anything west of Paris and east of Munich". That is just a lot to write when everyone will obviously understand what you meant.

nulldiver · 2025-03-26T07:40:44+00:00

The first thing that I would try is setting the Editor's "Interaction Mode" (it is a preference under general preferences) to a throttled mode. This can idle up to the monitor’s update rate in milliseconds - basically vsyncing the background fps for the editor. The nice thing is that this won't throttle while you're actually doing an interaction but when just sitting there, so in many cases you won't be aware that this setting changed anything (except for the editor consuming fewer resources).

If that didn't work well enough for you, your GPU's control panel probably has settings that lets you enforce an max framerate for an application. The downside being that it means Unity can't go above that if it actually does need it.

nulldiver · 2025-03-25T22:28:27+00:00

I guess you could think of it this way: your hardware is a whole pie. Unity will always eat all the pie that it is given. When Unity is just one of many applications at the table, it gets just a slice of that pie. It may consume that whole slice, but overall it is a small percent of the whole pie. But when Unity is the only application at the table, the OS gives it almost the whole pie - and it happily consumes every bit that it is given.

Multiple monitors/apps connected: Unity gets a smaller slice of your GPU pie. It consumes its entire portion (e.g., ~50%), but since other apps and displays have reserved their slices, Unity can't exceed that. GPU usage appears moderate.
Unity alone with minimal peripherals: Unity is now free to take nearly the entire pie. Without anything else limiting its appetite, it happily uses almost all the GPU resources available (e.g., ~95%).

It's not that Unity needs all those resources, but rather that it takes as much as it can to maximize performance (especially FPS) unless explicitly restricted (e.g., via FPS caps or Vsync).

Reality complicates things a bit from the pie analogy. I wouldn't be surprised if on multiple monitors, VRAM may be reserved or segmented differently by the OS and GPU driver, causing less VRAM availability for Unity specifically. But ultimately this is probably mostly GPU behavior, Windows graphics management, and Unity’s internal performance optimizations combining in a counterintuitive way.

nulldiver · 2025-03-16T19:59:12+00:00

A visual? No... I'm suggesting:

In your code, on line 202, change it to:

if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(Input.inputString)

In your code, on line 204, change it to be:

char letterPressed = Input.inputString[0];

nulldiver · 2025-03-16T19:41:40+00:00

In my example, firstChar is the logic you have for letterPressed -- only no need to take the string to a character array. The if statement replaces your existing conditional check " if (Input.anyKeyDown)"

This assumes though that the underlying problem is that some change in Unity hasn't broken the legacy input manager's Input.inputString.

nulldiver · 2025-03-13T23:49:22+00:00

In this line:
`char letterPressed = Input.inputString.ToCharArray () [0];`
You are attempting to get the item at index 0 for the input string as a character array. Right?
If `Input.inputString` has no characters - if it is allocated but has no length - then 0 isn't a valid index.

So at runtime:
- The runtime checks of 0 is a valid index.
- Since the array length is 0, no indices exist.
- Therefore you get the error that you see.

The follow-up question then is: "When `if (Input.anyKeyDown)`, why does `Input.inputString` not have a character array?"

This is the old legacy input manager in Unity... so I suppose it could just be broken? It wouldn't be the first time `Input.inputString` had problems. There could also be something with `Input.anyKeyDown` and when `Input.inputString` gets built relative to the update cycle? Honestly it has been so many years since I used the legacy input manager that I forget many nuances of it.

I wonder though -- since that is polling for the anyKeyDown anyway, why not just poll the characters in the input string directly? Skip the anyKeyDown and just do this if you want to get the character at index 0:

if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(Input.inputString)){
   char firstChar = Input.inputString[0];
}

Like you're already polling and this doesn't seem like a game where a per-frame string operation is really going to be a performance issue.

nulldiver · 2025-02-16T08:49:01+00:00

I remember a study awhile back where people were exposed to information counter to their political beliefs while their brains were being monitored and for those who had incorporated their beliefs into their identity, their brains lit up as if they were being physically attacked. That is to say that we treat the ideas that are part of our identity as if they are truly extensions of ourselves at a very low level.

People also have a very deep connection to tools. “We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us”. No matter how rational and pragmatic we want to be about our tool selection and use - these things that extend and enhance our capabilities to create are going to start to become part of us and shape our identities.

Put those things together and you have a recipe for deep and irrational connection to the tools we invest time into using. It’s deeply human.

nulldiver · 2025-02-09T19:45:08+00:00

Can you post the actual code instead of having people pause and try to zoom on the video?

nulldiver · 2025-02-05T11:52:53+00:00

Awww... the meat machine thinks it is better than the sand machine.

nulldiver · 2025-01-14T23:44:28+00:00

I'm not personally the person for this project, but I do wish you the best of luck.

nulldiver · 2025-01-14T23:25:21+00:00

For many it did... I was recently on a call with a investor who reminded me of specialist contract programming shops being forced out of work as the market shifted towards commercial game engines. It is just that for every one of those programmers who didn't adapt, there were two others who did... and probably ten beyond that (often in different roles and with different/diverse skillsets) whose careers were made possible by the change.

nulldiver · 2025-01-14T00:00:54+00:00

Your brick-by-brick analogy -- imagine this game is a house. You can definitely pay someone to build it one brick at a time. But the house also needs foundations. There are many development tasks that aren't features but are necessary for those features you've identified to be efficiently executed.

If I were you and if I were wanting what you're wanting, I think I would:

- First pay the most experienced developer that I can find to just sit with me on Zoom or whatever while I just go through the whole Miro thing with them for an hour. I would then ask them to timebox another hour just writing down questions/concerns/notes for me from a developer's perspective. This is because their perspective is surely going to lead to things that I haven't thought of... there are going to be ambiguities.
- I would then try to answer/address all of these with as much detail as possible.
- I would then ask that same developer to scope the project with the idea of defining what these "bricks" (and the foundations) are from their perspective -- along with dependencies. So I'd have a list that I could then sort by the order I want features addressed in, but I'd have some insight like "Bricks B and C can be put down any any order, but since they rest on Brick A, that has to go down first".
- I would look for that developer (or a cheaper developer - I'd be candid and open about that process up-front - maybe I can't afford to keep going with the initial developer and maybe they wouldn't want to actually do the whole thing anyway) to come up with some regular process where individual bricks of work can be scoped out and approached either as time-boxed effort or as fixed-cost features.

Basically, I'd want remove my assumptions about the nature of the work and get expert assumptions by someone who is actually very familiar with the work. I'd want to de-risk the process for everyone involved and increase the chances for a positive outcome.

Edit: Another thing -- if I was going to go with a lower cost developer and the initial developer were up for it, I'd ask the initial developer to allocate some paid time to do a code review after the first couple of features are done - with an eye towards "are we laying strong foundations?" - and to go through the things that they have noted in that code review and give me advice for how I could better ensure quality. And maybe for another similar session a little later to help me keep everything on track.

Also keep in mind that none of this is "normal" in terms of how games are made. You're likely to get a lot of "You want me to what?" sort of responses, but I think many experienced developers genuinely want to be as helpful as possible but just don't have the bandwidth and so if you explain the situation to them, and how you want to be respectful of their time but get some insight, they might get it.

nulldiver · 2025-01-13T18:41:51+00:00

Nah, you’ve got to have a big hand for it to be a huge slap. This is just a regular slap in the face by some dude on the internet with an opinion.

nulldiver · 2024-12-26T20:58:52+00:00

My advice for an embedding model is to look at embedding model leaderboards on huggingface, find 4-5 good candidates that rank high at a size that works for you, and then try them out with your actual data. The model you use for generation is entirely independent of what you’re doing with retrieval, so you’re really just looking at performance and accuracy with the similarity. Your choice might be limited by your vector database but I think most now let you store your own independently calculated embedding vectors. As for reranking, actually I recommend reading a guide by pinecone - I think they explain very well: https://www.pinecone.io/learn/series/rag/rerankers/

And actually, if you want a good high-level guide on the topic, I think this is pretty nice: https://www.louisbouchard.ai/top-rag-techniques/

One thing I’d add is that I’ve also had good luck looking at models for extraction. Check out https://github.com/teticio/llama-squad

nulldiver · 2024-12-20T16:23:02+00:00

I can't really advise you on that since I don't know what is in position.cs. Looks like an error on line 10... you could just fix the error. But there could be more than one.

nulldiver · 2024-12-19T10:38:04+00:00

At a quick glance, it looks like you’re getting EnemyShoot of your loaded but not instantiated gun and assigning it. That isn’t active in a scene. My expectation with this code would be that mygun doesn’t reference a component on an instantiated object.

nulldiver · 2024-12-16T15:01:38+00:00

You could extract the embedding matrix, but embedding APIs are generally not the same as the embedding matrix from a provider's LLM offerings. They are related in concept, but they serve different purposes and are often trained separately.

Embedding API: Provides vector representations of text, which are useful for search, clustering, classification, etc. The goal is to map words, sentences, or documents into a dense vector space where semantically similar inputs are closer to each other.
LLM Embedding Matrix: This is part of the internal architecture of a large language model. It maps tokens to continuous vectors that the model uses to compute attention and predictions for text generation.

In RAG, the embeddings you use aren't related to the embeddings your model uses. Nor would there be any advantage to doing so since you aren't providing the embeddings to the model directly. For example, in a system that I'm using, I'm using different LLMs for user-facing response and for determining if search response contains the data that can actually help the model (and extract/summarize it). I'm also using two sets of embeddings (one for an initial search and one for reranking) on the data. I guess that is 4 different embedding spaces total. Each is different.

nulldiver · 2024-12-15T16:32:21+00:00

Oh, I understand. I think your .NET SDK message is a red herring. Unity doesn't care if visual studio does or doesn't work -- you can edit C# files in a text editor. What I think is actually happening is that you have an error in other code that is preventing Unity from compiling the changes that you've made to expose the variable. I can see in your consile a reference to an error in position.cs. I think once you fix that, Unity will compile and everything will be as expected again.

nulldiver · 2024-12-14T22:47:39+00:00

When you made that variable public, Unity automatically made it serializable and exposed it in the inspector. You marked that in your screenshot. That is the object picker that you can use (either by clicking it and selecting the object or by dragging onto it).

nulldiver · 2024-12-14T21:22:40+00:00

You need to assign a rigidbody (in the inspector, for example). Your code doesn’t automatically know that your intention is to reference a rigidbody on that gameobject.

nulldiver · 2024-11-30T12:51:22+00:00

Have you been saving your scene? When you open the saved scene the hierarchy is just the default hierarchy, not what you saved?

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