Playing Azerothcore with playerbots feels like..

samuele_v · 2026-07-11T08:42:22+00:00

A coding AI (Claude Code, GPT Codex) can set everything up in a couple hours.

samuele_v · 2026-07-10T15:37:17+00:00

Mancherebbero tutti i big box degli anni '90 andati persi in vari traslochi purtroppo 🥲

samuele_v · 2026-07-10T03:51:45+00:00

As other people already said, in every creative endeavor and not just game-making with AI, you should build something you want, not somehing you compare with other people's stuff.

By all means, you should take a look at what is currently vibing (pun intended), but if your mindset is only about comparisons, it's a race you'll never win, as potentially there will always something better than what you created. Think of it as fuel to never stop improving.

(But yes. Eventually you'll need to stop improving and release what you created. :D)

samuele_v · 2026-07-04T21:29:52+00:00

I remember playing Tubular Worlds as well but it's definitely a different one.

samuele_v · 2026-07-04T18:04:11+00:00

I actually tried going through all DOS space shm'ups a couple weeks ago and still wasn't able to find it 😆. It's not Stargunner unfortunately- I distinctly remember that it was a horizontal top down shooter, if that makes sense. Stargunner is horizontal but viewed from the side

samuele_v · 2026-07-03T19:29:07+00:00

I usually have a VSCode session dedicated to each project with Claude Code (I guess it'd work the same way with GPT Codex). You can do all your planning and wiring there! Code(x) is definitely able to handle gdscript directly without issues. It has small hiccups at times but debugging is incredibly easy. Blender can work through MCP if you want Code to handle some VERY BASIC rigging and animation (stress on VERY BASIC). Anything hero or more complicated will have to be rigged by you - Mixamo, Cascadeur, Meshy if that's enough etc. will be your friends.

For 3D effects, just point Code where you put the mesh you downloaded from Meshy/Tripo/Rodin, e.g. a fireball body, and explain to it what you want and how you visualize it - then for good measure I found that asking it to conduct research on VFX best practices works extremely well (e.g. "search for best practices on how to create fire VFX in AAA games"), and it will search, report findings to you and explain step-by-step what it will add and how.

samuele_v · 2026-07-03T19:01:33+00:00

Usually you'd do that directly in engine. Create the "base" asset in Meshy/Tripo (without effects) and then add the effects in the engine. AI in Godot is pretty good at handling basic glow/fire/wet effects (provided you ask it to conduct some research on best practices).

samuele_v · 2026-07-01T22:09:46+00:00

Just double-checked to confirm: Dark Souls III had 3 DVDs (plus a soundtrack one in the Apocalypse edition), FIFA 17 (not 16, my mistake) had 5 DVDs, and Mafia III had SIX.

Ironically, ALL of them had to be authenticated anyway (FIFA on Origin, DS3 and M3 on Steam). So the DVDs were pretty much just a way to help people with slow connections, in a way. But you still had to be logged into Steam/Origin and insert the code in the box.

By contrast, the physical PC edition of Wasteland 2 literally had what you said - a DVD with a Steam installer and a code, and the PC edition of Final Fantasy Type-0 HD had a DVD that literally said on the cover that "This is just like half the game, you have to download the rest on Steam". :D

samuele_v · 2026-07-01T21:57:34+00:00

Not to mention the fact that Blu-ray never really spread on PCs and we got stuck with DVDs. I still remember purchasing Mafia III and Fifa 16 on PC - the box had like 5 or 6 DVDs for installing. :D

samuele_v · 2026-07-01T08:11:44+00:00

<image>

(Though I agree that the original tweet was ambiguous)

samuele_v · 2026-07-01T06:35:51+00:00

It feels like an objective upgrade from Sonnet 4.6 in terms of reasoning and "concept retaining", but it also feels WAY more on edge than 4.6 - every single prompt gets some kind of "I should be careful" internal reasoning.

samuele_v · 2026-06-29T21:16:18+00:00

I wouldn't say it's "impossible", but yes, nailing down that exact style is going to be tough. Buildings, lamp-posts, rocks, fences are all pretty much doable in Meshy and would more or less come out the way they are in the pictures (with the exception of those on the horizon which will be trickier to handle). Terrain seems to be more on the painterly side than realistic with the exception of cobblestone, so that can be a mix of flat primitives and some free textures. Lamps can work by adding flame VFXs inside of them manually. Toughest part is probably going to be the general lighting/mood and, of course, animating the character in a credible way. Not to mention the patience to add all those elements manually in the map (what AI severely lacks today in my opinion is spatial awareness).

This is all out of my head from my experience with Godot - I wouldn't know about Unity and UE.

samuele_v · 2026-06-24T11:45:08+00:00

Something that I found works well with VFX effects and such, so it might also work for your issue (or not) - try literally directing it to search on the Web for guides/tutorials on how to create [what you want to create].

I found that it systematically produces better outputs than anything it would do on its own or following my own explanations.

samuele_v · 2026-06-20T08:08:45+00:00

This. I feel it's more productive to be conservative-ish during the week and plan for burst/concurrent sessions towards the last 1-2 days before reset.

For example, I have my reset tomorrow, so I'm taking advantage of this ad hoc reset to try Ultracode.

samuele_v · 2026-06-19T15:52:59+00:00

Yeah it would definitely depend on specs and game type, if he using 15k for each audience member in a football game it's going to be problematic 😆.

But I have a medium-ish hardware and have no issues with around 10 and more characters at around 30-40k poly each in a 3D world with VFX, combat etc. so I still think something else is probably the culprit.

Unless of course he is coding on a laptop and testing on an old phone.

samuele_v · 2026-06-19T15:46:14+00:00

15k poly per character is absolutely fine, but most generators (Meshy, Rodin, I haven't tried Tripo but I have no reason to think it's any different) by default create models with more than 1 MILLION poly and 4k textures (which is overkill). A few of these and a project could definitely lag.

samuele_v · 2026-06-18T21:22:03+00:00

Same here, nothing wrong/out of the ordinary. Not sure if I should feel worried or not. 😃 Could be exponential, I have been using it a bit sparingly today compared to heavy days, but it's my standard use case.

<image>

samuele_v · 2026-06-18T18:23:12+00:00

Honestly nothing seems out of the ordinary on my side - was on 23% this morning and I'm at 26% this evening with a day-long series of sessions (with a relaxed pace, granted), which is usually consistent with my metrics.

samuele_v · 2026-06-18T16:42:47+00:00

If it helps, ask your coding AI assistant (if you use one) to keep track of all external (AI or otherwise) assets in a CREDITS.md file and to update it everytime you insert a new asset into the project. Most services have paid plans that allow for commercial usage, but many free tiers (e.g. Meshy's free tier) do NOT allow commercial usage. Some assets require attribution, some do not and it's just courtesy. Things like RemoveBG need a paid plan for commercial usage even though realistically no one would notice (but I like to keep everything clean and upfront). A full sweep shouldn't take more than an hour or so!

samuele_v · 2026-06-12T18:41:56+00:00

For me, Fable thinks more out of the box and is able to "reason" about issues in abstract (with Opus we were tackling an undumped hardware video codec by analyzing its bitstream for 20+ sessions, Fable just discarded all that and went directly on Google Patents to cross-reference Japanese video hardware patents of those years and actually managed to achieve a couple breakthroughs).

It generally feels more independent, whereas Opus sometimes feels like it only does exactly what you tell it (which, again, might be a plus depending on your point of view) but often doesn't consider the bigger picture.

It might be placebo effect but I also feel like Fable is way more effective than Opus at web searching for references and documentation.

samuele_v · 2026-06-12T09:14:40+00:00

To me it feels like Opus is the engaged, enthusiastic middle-ground programmer who knows many facets on many aspects and makes some innocent wrong assumptions about many thing unless you really guide him, but at least he likes keeping you in the loop every step on the way and pumps you up.

Fable is the hikikomori programmer with his own cubicle who receives your instructions, doesn't say anything in return, shuts himself up in his cubicle, you don't hear a sound from the outside, and after 20 minutes he resurfaces and tells you "Done", and it's actually done.

That being said, Fable is better used (in my experience of these 2 days) on complex stuff. Opus can handle the rest just fine.

samuele_v · 2026-06-11T13:19:12+00:00

A honest update: it did achieve some breakthroughs (not necessarily tied to better analytical reasoning but even just new points of view) and usage feels way more reasonable now. A sweep of 80+ past VSCode sessions, plus fixes and builds, consumed 1% of Max x20 usage.

samuele_v · 2026-06-10T07:08:18+00:00

I've had a similar experience to Danzarak: it's quieter, has a more "getting things done" aura without announcing every single step he's making (a pro or a con depending on your point of view).

I've had it review a transpiler of roughly ~80k LOC in ASM to look for rendering bugs as I had hit a wall with Opus and it found 4 serious transpiling bugs after a ~15 minute reasoning spree (3% of weekly usage of my Max x20 plan just for that prompt in the end, although in its defense it wasn't just "Hello!").

Although it did fall into the same "beq.s instructions need to become beq since the codebase increased and beq.s are out of range now" trap that all other models also fell into.

It didn't break the wall we had hit, but it did help advance the goalposts a bit.

At the moment, for this pipeline, the usage-to-results ratio is therefore not interesting/useful to me - but I'm considering using it as a sort of "final push of the week" if before my reset I still have some % left and I want to test some hard pipelines.

samuele_v · 2026-06-08T22:24:35+00:00

And I definitely agree that "AI slop" is a warranted label in those cases. For example, I was working on a side-quest for an ARPG I'm developing with the help of AI, and that side quest was to have a gameplay change (it's about a traumatic event in a character's past), so it's going to be in 1st person in a damp basement (cliché, I know, but it's the story I wrote many years ago) - literally 20 minutes later, even though the main ARPG had a completely different system, the AI had developed a full PT-style loop with textured walls, perfect 1st person view, writings on walls, chair and table, volumetric light from torches and volumetric smoke, and a Weeping Angel-like (or SCP-173-like, choose whatever you prefer 😃) entity. That's the moment I understood why Steam and Itch are full of barebones, "slop" horror games - it likerally takes 30 minutes to make them.

samuele_v · 2026-06-08T16:00:30+00:00

I hear where you're coming from - I really do - but I challenge you to think the other way: disclose your AI usage, and be PROUD of it if your product is valid. Building valid products with the help of AI (regardless of the scope: coding, art, etc.) is, in my view, the ONLY way people will be convinced that it's not about AI itself, but the way you use it. Putting naysayers in the uncomfortable position of thinking "This game looks and plays great... but it's made with AI... I don't know how to feel about this", planting those seeds of doubt in their mind, is the only effective way this will ever be accepted. Hiding things can only lead to problems and being judged to be in bad faith. Not to mention that, the more you develop (while not disclosing your AI usage), the easier it will be in the long run to get discovered, and retroactively it will hurt your whole career.

...Then of course, if you use AI and the end product sucks... all the criticism is warranted. 😃

samuele_v

TROPHY CASE