Quite a while ago I decided, for what reason I don't know, to take Dwarf Fortress's exported fully-populated world, translate it through a layer of LLM to obfuscate all the races to new fantasy races and create outlandish points of interest, and put the whole thing in a renderer that could dynamically move around and zoom to create a nicely rendered watercolor-style map for a massive explorable TTRPG type world.
I gave up the idea when it was like 1% done but if you'd like to have any of the nonsense I created in case there's something useful you can turn it into, you're welcome to it. It's in Python.
"Where there's muck, there's brass"
In general, if you can do the more difficult aspects, then you'll be more in demand (both because people need them done, and because it'll serve as a badge that yes you know what you're doing in a general sense).
In games specifically, it's more likely that you'd find yourself doing optimization, or the low levels of porting a game from one system to another, as opposed to writing an engine from scratch. If it were me, I would probably get involved in some existing project and try to write a new low-level system (e.g. a Gaussian splatting renderer for Unity or something) as opposed to just reinventing a new engine of my own. But absolutely, if you're skilled with the deeper systems aspects as opposed to just using the existing tools, it'll help you generally speaking.
Yeah. Normally there's a swiss cheese model where multiple failures had to line up together to make a problem. MCAS was the only non-flight-crew-related problem I've ever heard of where it was just one thing. One thing failed, the plane flew itself inexorably into the ground, everyone's dead, the end.
And, engineers involved tried to raise the alarm that it was a problem.
So do you see the problem as genart not producing consistent enough things for it to work (at least from models built and manicured anonymously).
Not exactly - that might be a problem yes, but mostly I'm saying that being able to save the time you'd need to spend making art assets has already been possible for quite a while because you could download models by the thousands from free sites and they were perfectly good. Second Wind actually just recently made a video about making a game based on free assets ("asset flip" games), and in their latest video they said a bunch of people actually were really interested in the crappy-on-purpose quick game they talked about making, because it looked kind of good.
The core thing that has to be there is the dopamine loop that makes playing the game fun, and the investment of genuine heart (for lack of a better word) that makes it a real and satisfying experience. It's a lot harder than it would seem like, and a lot of times if you dig into the development process behind really good games they had this super-obsessive focus on polishing the experience to the point where it was tight and enjoyable and real, because that doesn't happen on its own and it's really not that easy to do. Hollow Knight's player sprite is more or less unchanged from the original Newgrounds game; I'm sure it was just sketched out pretty quickly, but having the asset didn't take away from having to do all the back-breaking work that came after that to get the game as good as it was. Lethal Company might as well be an "asset flip game" visually; it just kind of doesn't matter for that particular game to how much fun it winds up being.
Again I'm not saying AI won't help. I'm just saying the level of effort that comes after the art assets exist is still kind of backbreaking if you want the game to be good.
Personally I like to think of most games even 3d and 2d-- what would a text based client look like, would it be a terminal with commands or options presented in order, etc. Because thats the part of the game that matters most.
In my envisioning, it was a Discord bot with slash commands for the verbs, so you have some guidance as to what's possible and not, but then you have some linguistic leeway for what comes after the verb. They used to make text-based games (type a command, get some text as the answer) and some were real classics.
I'm not trying at all to dissuade you from the 3d game you were talking about making, just mentioning since your post reminded me of it.
The whole history of the decision-making that led to the MCAS system made it clear to anyone who's ever worked in an engineering organization that more failures were coming. The engineers saying "This is a problem, don't do it this way" and the management saying "STFU, I'm in charge, do as I say" never, ever leads anywhere good.
Some people didn't read up on what happened to Ernst Röhm
I could run my own, yeah, that'd be a fine option. I plan to at some point anyway, just trying to avoid the time investment for as long as I can postpone it. I found some likely places and DMed the admins to ask if it'd be okay; if no one's open to the idea, I might bite the bullet though yes.
Yeah, I'm sorta inclined to agree; I looked at how it works out in practice and it's definitely a little obnoxious. I disabled it for now.
It's tough because I'd like for it to be accessible both from the big instances like lemmy.world, and from the instances like beehaw that have defederated the big instances. So that tends to imply that a good home for it would be on one of the little instances. But, it's not gonna sit well on the little instances if it's making a firehose (relatively speaking) and overwhelming their local feeds.
IDK; I'll ask around and see if I can find a good home for it. Absent some person coming in and saying "yes ruining the local feed is ok" I'm gonna conclude that that's not SDF though.
(From memory, so there might be tiny mistakes in the language:)
"If we could climb the highest steeple
and then look down on all the people,
and shoot the ones not wholly good,
as we, like noble shooters, should,
Why then there'd be an only worry:
Who'd be left to bury
Us?"
-Walt Kelly
Sounds like it'd work great. You might want to use something like DigitalOcean instead of your home machine, for a couple different reasons. DigitalOcean is cheap for this type of application (like on the order of, IDK, $5-10 a month or something).
Also, fair warning, the current generation of Fediverse software is a pain in the ass to install, even before you get into issues of upgrading it, staying on top of security of the server, etc etc. But sure, it's doable if you're savvy and willing to invest some small time into it.
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I mean, it's working for her so far. What else is she qualified to make six figures at, let alone while not having to behave professionally or do any work?
If she believed in hell, I think she'd have some reservations, but as it is I think she's probably pleased as punch about the result.
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I don't think she cares what the actual policy is. The point is, she gets to make noise about the right's well-trodden favorite topic. What's actually going on is of no concern.
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Good point, just added that to my comment as well.
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