I don’t agree with this drowning sentiment. It’s much easier now to build capable stuff. That’s what the data is showing you. Pre AI nostalgia - sure, I built a PPC profiler in assembly by hand, but who am I to say the latest AI induced gadgetry is not as cool. And I am an active participant.
Incredibly I didn't do anything, I just told codex to use playwright cli, told it what to check (in plain English), and it did its thing. Looking at its log I can see that it was "playing" the game and defining its own test conditions, such as if the player/NPC is *not* on one of the "collidable" tiles, if the NPC is "going over the edge" of a collidable area, if it's facing the wrong way, etc. Sometimes it found bugs, e.g. it was testing for gravity checks and then it found that one of the movements was not working correctly and it went ahead and fixed it.
So essentially it uses CLI to read all the x,y coordinates, speed, timing, it took screenshots, and combined those together.
My learning from this is - just let the agent do it. Actually trying to interfere with specific conditions and checks lowers the agent's performance. Simply give it a guide.
Yeah character walking (and honestly any animation) is still a real pain. I've seen some people try to use video models almost like a rotoscoping tool but it always looks kind of sus honestly.
Maintaining consistency across a set of loopable frames still takes a fair amount of manual work. Here's an example I put together using controlnet and openpose.
I don't have any professional experience but I did build a pacman clone in Turbo Pascal (on MS DOS) back in the 90s. Also I've been playing games all my life so have a feeling for what's important - collision detection, walkable/collidable areas, speed/timing, some basic NPC logic etc. So that seemed to have been sufficient in this case :-)
I’ve been doing this for the past 15 years - writing “LAZYs”, started off as just .txt files, now .md. The nice thing with it now you can search through it easily or give it to Codex
I was really impressed with how Ollama 3 ran on an AMD VEGA64 (~2017 tech) with only 8gb of [HBM] RAM. It was definitely limited, but very local and helpful.
Gemini Rue is probably one of the best game stories I have ever seen. What Joshua Nuernberger did there is amazing. The "twist" that occurs there in the final third is something else. And it's built using AGS.
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