invader

Not Blizzard. A French game developer and publisher that has been defunct for many years now. But even then, I remember talking to colleagues from other studios and many used Alienbrain - primarily for art assets. We used SVN and later git/mercurial for code.

Since Alienbrain was quite popular back then, I assume they are still around now. Given that git still has no out-of-the-box facilities to handle large binaries and asset previews conveniently.

Virtually 100% of non-indie devs use Perforce.

Not really. There are better products out there.

When I worked at Triple-A studio, we used Alienbrain, which is specifically tailored for huge binary versioning with previews and stuff. We had terabytes of assets, and Alienbrain handled it well, including seamless integration into pipelines - something a stock git or Perforce would never achieve.

Yes, it had that problem.

But it is hardly unique, and it concerns the community more than the platform itself. Many communities with anonymous access end up toxic. It is nothing new and dates back to early BBSs and FidoNet, where a hostile attitude reached unbelievable levels.

Sure thing, the LLMs will be more polite than humans. For now...

Step 1: Here emerges a platform where everyone can ask, answer, or discuss questions on software development.

Step 2: The platform becomes the ultimate knowledge base with community-curated answers on virtually any question related to software development.

Step 3: Another company scraps the community-driven database to train its model.

Step 4: The model is so efficient that people start asking questions of the model, killing in the process any traffic to the platform that helped to create it in the first place.

Step 5: Profit. People who spent years asking, answering, and curating programming knowledge for free are now paying for that knowledge repacked in the model weights. The original knowledge base is essentially dead.

Question: What programming knowledge base will be used to train future models?

Are we at the Skynet moment where people will be totally cut out of the loop from now on?

So, the developers have finally found their Silver Bullet?

I've seen so many of these already. It would be hilarious to see Brooks proving right once again.

If the author hasn't bothered to spend time writing the article, why should I spend my time reading it? Let agents do it for me!

Maybe it is, given that the classical AI definition is so broad, it can mean almost anything. But for me, there's a fundamental difference between something that "tries to be intelligent" and something that "tries to appear to be intelligent".

That is why I prefer to call them "bots" or "computers" - just to separate them from a shifting mess of definitions of what "AI" actually means. It reminds me of "Destination Void" by Frank Herbert, where the main characters were trying to build artificial consciousness and were struggling to define what it actually means.

Often, but not always.

I hate the term "AI" applied to games, since AI means so many things and usually implies something smart, "intelligent". But in reality, it is more like a "bot" or a "computer player". And the main goal is not to be super-smart, but to be plausible enough and provide an appropriate challenge to the human player.

There are some "fair" bots in games - like in my favorite turn-based Mechanized Assault and Exploration from the mid 90s. Computer players follow the same rules as the human ones - e.g., if something is not visible to the radar, the computer will not see it. The only "cheat" is the resource boost computer players can have on the higher difficulty settings, but it is totally optional. And as an experienced player, you always let the computer have it, since you want a challenge, and without that boost, it has no chance whatsoever.

It was definitely something unorthodox - I remember being confused about how it actually worked.

The first time I played, I thought "It is just like Quake". Then you start to notice that the levels are pretty limited - it is all narrow corridors with rare small chambers and open spaces, no steep elevation changes, no rooms above rooms... Kinda like Doom. But then, father's examination shows sloped surfaces, shelves and bridges - stuff the Doom engine can't do.

Maybe, for level geometry, it is closer to portal rendering engines like Build. Still looks pretty claustrophobic even compared to Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. I feel the Chasm level designers could've got more variety from that technology, but again, maybe that was some fundamental limitation. Or maybe it is just like FPS were designed in the mid 90s.

Monsters, items and weapons are fully 3D, though. With dynamic lighting!

In the storm of Doom-Quake mania of the mid 90s there was Chasm: The Rift by a small Ukrainian company Action Forms. And if memory serves me right, it was created in Turbo Pascal. It was late in development and came out in 1997 after Quake, so it didn't get much traction. But the engine, though pretty limited, could produce 3D enemies with interesting effects not found even in Quake.

So Turbo Pascal (with a whole bunch of x86 asm inclusions) was totally capable of producing Quake-level games. I myself, in the late 90s, discovered the hidden capacities when I learned x86 assembly from Peter Abel's book. Once I got rid of the primitive TP BGI library and switched to VGA 13h, it was an unbelievable level up in abilities to manipulate pixels on the screen!

So they discovered Can-D from The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch?

Now we just have to wait for a visitor from Proxima with more potent Chew-Z. The grim future is closer than we think...

But art is also going to be severely disrupted by AI, since AI companies have stolen all the art and music on the Internet and now are essentially remixing plagiarized content as new art and calling it progress.

Handcrafting a new version of Collider.JAM (http://collider.land/) - a JavaScript framework for rapid game prototyping. Ludum Dare 59 is coming, and any coding samurai needs to sharpen their katana. And Ludum Dare is a perfect excuse to do just that.

IMHO, Ludum Dare is The Jam for many reasons and it is a pity that it's slowly fading away (the last Mike Kasprzak's post explains some of the challenges https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/$424396/ludum-dare-59...). It looks like we don't have many events left in the pipeline, and this one will be a nice opportunity to participate and still enjoy the sunset of the era and the vibes of the awesome community.

However, to be fair, Desert Storm hasn't resulted in regime change. The Coalition bombed the shit out of the Iraqi army, but never committed to the ground operation deep inside Iraq. And Saddam's regime survived until the next war.

That alone hints that it is very hard to bring a dictatorship down with just aerial attacks - the ground component is also essential. Something tells me it is going to be the same here.

Only a land operation or a total collapse of the government, with the armed police and military joining the opposition, can topple the Iranian regime.

Yes, Descent II OST is on a totally different level compared to the MIDI-only Descent I soundtrack. And by famous musicians to boot - like Type O Negative and Ogre of Skinny Puppy, who created my favorite "Glut" and "Ratzez" tracks. It was the time when games became big enough to bring popular musicians aboard for the soundtrack, Quake with Trent Reznor being a perfect example.

Also, the series was followed by Descent Freespace I/II, leaving a significant impact on the genre of space shooters. Though there are completely different games that have nothing to do with the original series.

Awesome! Brings me back into my teenage years when I was rewatching the movie on VHS hundreds of times, especially the cyberspace surfing sequences - all covered by the epic soundtrack. Orbital still sounds fresh in my ears after all these years.

I was also so inspired by this Gibson supercomputer interface when I created my little game prototype for js13k games contest 10 years ago:

https://invadium.itch.io/cybergrid-13

Now I think I should've used flight mechanics like in flight simulators instead of walking, but the cyberspace and viruses are still there. Maybe I will refresh it one day to give a more Hacker-like ambient flight feeling.

People should also stop using terminal emulators. It is pretty silly to base software around ancient printing terminals. Everyone knows for a fact that only tech illiterates use a console instead of a GUI. Since all great devs use a GUI. Just a fact.

Also, people should stop playing 2D games. It is pretty silly to base your entertainment on ancient technology when modern GPUs can render super-complex 3D scenes.

And don't make me start on people who still buy vinyl...

And I've seen Microsoft buying companies and killing their products despite active communities over and over again. A blatant breach of antitrust laws that Microsoft somehow managed to get away with.

So Micro$oft is a customer-oriented company now? Haven't heard such a good joke in a while.

Microsoft, being a monopoly, hardly cares about customers, especially about closing some imaginary "gaps". What they care about is preserving their dominant or monopoly position wherever they can, since in the last 25+ years, they lost so badly so many times, they shifted from "owning" the whole industry to being a monopoly in particular segments. They are basically repeating the path of IBM from being the industry to being irrelevant and struggling desperately to stop that inevitable process.

If Microsoft had listened to its customers, it would never have neglected and killed Skype, it would have continued to support XNA, so adored by the indie game devs, it would never have closed Arkane Austin and Ghostwire studios, it would have never preinstalled spyware with every single Windows installation... But Microsoft hardly cares.

Yet another klunge in the ivory tower of software bloat. It is like all existing software is gravitating towards a single point of singularity, with all existing platforms merging into an incomprehensible black hole, sucking the whole of humanity with it.

There was no real point in WSL in the first place, except for desperate attempts by Microsoft to stay relevant in the cloud age. To take two huge and very different systems with all their bugs and idiosyncrasies, merge them (creating even more bugs and idiosyncrasies along the way), and call it progress? I call it insanity. Only now with FreeBSD.

Ton is a legend and a personal hero of mine. He is a great innovator and an open-source superstar who disrupted the entire industry, traditionally dominated by big corporations.

The entire Blender story is captivating - from modeler and raytracer prototypes on Amiga to the Internet bubble startup to the famous crowdfunding campaign to free Blender... It is a story that deserves a movie.

For anyone interested in open-source history who is not familiar with the Blender story, I would highly recommend Ton's interview with Blender Guru, where he reflects on his journey - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJEWOTZnFeg&t=1523s

Why do we need to listen to justifications of crazy warmongering dictators?

According to Hitler (as well as Putin, who really justified Hitler in that same interview) Poland made him start the war by refusing to give up Danzig.

Any dictator in history had a cover story before starting a war. And by spreading such a story you become a part of the aggressor's propaganda machine.

Yep, it all comes down to have enough gamers to afford expensive cloud infrastructure. And a regular geo-distribution of computing resources is not working well in this case.

Let's assume the usage peaks on Friday eve in LA area. The LA resource pool must have enough capacity for the peak. And on Saturday early morning that usage drops almost to zero. Now we might want to reuse freed resources to serve another currently active user pool, maybe in Tokyo. But we are dealing with highly specialized cloud resources not that easily reusable. You can't use LA servers to serve users in Tokyo - the latency will be too high.

Now we need to deploy our resources near all big urban population centres for all target markets. And these resources would stay mostly unused because of the latency and usage patterns (unless we're going to mine crypto with unused GPUs). And once we move out of densely populated areas, the problem becomes bigger.

So it is really hard to see how that can be economically feasible.

It died because it solved the problem nobody really had. It's Startup 101.

Who said hardware is the problem? Modern consoles are relatively cheap, especially considering modern $60 price tags on games. So why Stadia tried to solve that?

I'm sure Google has a lot of brilliant engineers who can build a state-of-the-art streaming platform that can leverage existing Google cloud infrastructure. But that's all it is - a brilliant piece of technology nobody really needs. And not that innovative as well - I've met a bunch of game streaming startups back at Jan 2016 CES, something like two years prior the launch of Stadia, so the idea has been around for quite a while.

Hardcore gamers are buying a lot of overpriced gaming gear all the time. I can't see how people spending thousands of $ on tuned hardware suddenly would want to change all that on a faceless streaming platform. Ownership and belonging is a big part of that subculture.

Stadia could make sense for a casual gamer who doesn't want to invest into expensive hardware. But games a casual player plays are not GPU-heavy and work fine on any relatively modern platform.

Too basic for a hardcore gamer, too powerful and demanding for a casual one. The Stadia's fate was sealed.