I have only bought stardew valley once, because I only game on PC, but I definitely would buy it for multiple systems if I used them; it’s already such good value that I feel like I’m stealing. I do love a passion project.

I wonder if ConcernedApe has a proper desk yet

https://youtu.be/m6e_dUkW0sg

I did not know that, so thank you for sharing. I’m disappointed, but not surprised to learn this

“I have decided to make it public for developers who may face similar issues in the future.”

What a bro. Now this is what solidarity looks like

Thanks for the link. There have been a few people in this thread making this point, and I was considering asking them to elaborate so that I can gauge what my risk is from using pip for python. I appreciate you providing a resource so I can go learn more about this

Pentiment was great. You can feel that it’s made with so much passion.

I played with a friend who was a medievalist sitting beside me, and she confirmed that all the weird and wonderful marginalia animals were from actual manuscripts

Because it’s so repairable, you might be able to find a 3rd party to fix it for not too much. I don’t know what that would do with your warranty, but I figure that attempting the repair yourself would also void the warranty.

High availability of parts and repair guides tends to lower the price of repairs, even from 3rd party people. It’s why right to repair is so important

If you’re a weird nerd like me and want to learn about the legal complexities of this case in more depth, GamesFray has done some consistently excellent reporting on it

I’ve found that I actually seem to use more em-dashes since they became understood to be associated with AI — it’s a defiance thing. I mostly type on my phone, and to type an em dash, I just need to long press on the dash.

“Most of us have been in your shoes, with the same amount of fear, confusion and helpless feelings. So…uh…welcome to our little club. We get together sometimes and hang out (mostly virtually, admittedly).”

This exactly. I felt such an overwhelming sense of solidarity when reading this post because I have been in this position so many times before. Hell, I still occasionally get like this — although I am way more confident in solving most of my technical problems nowadays, that additional knowledge just makes it all the more frustrating when I run into something that makes me feel confused and overwhelmed.

I’m not going to give you any technical advice because there’s already a lot of suggestions already. I just wanted to leave a comment in solidarity.

I am the techiest person in my fairly techy group of friends, and even I often end up making silly mistakes that mess up my system sometimes. It’s easy to get overwhelmed, especially when there seems to be solutions to my problems that I’m not able to understand.

Trust me when I say that you’re not stupid for not getting this. This shit is difficult. I have been in your position so so many times before — right down to the despair making me feel suicidal. It’s hard when you desperately need to fix a thing, but the more you throw yourself at the problem, the harder it gets. Take as much of a break as you need to, and come back to some of the answers that sound promising, but you’re struggling to understand, and ask questions. You’re not dumb for not understanding — you’re new at this, and that’s okay.

I can’t speak for other people in this thread, but I know that when I’m giving technical advice to people, it often feels like I’m getting practice at communicating things in an accessible way. I want more people to be able to participate in this hobby that I enjoy, but I’ve been steeping in this environment for so long that sometimes, the advice that I give is overly dense, or it assumes knowledge that the person needing help doesn’t have. That’s an unfortunate mistake to make, because it makes the person reading my reply feel stupid, and that’s the last thing I want. I’ve found that giving technical advice online is often a mutual learning process — the person I’m helping is learning the tech stuff, and I’m learning how to communicate better. If you revisit some of the comments in this thread, bear that in mind — it’s not all on you.

On the topic of wishing you were stronger, I can relate to that — like I said, I’m pretty prone to getting myself into a spiral of shame when I don’t understand a thing and everything I do keeps getting worse. For what it’s worth, I think that asking for help as you have done here is something that requires a lot of strength; it’s hard to be vulnerable when you feel like you’re messing things up. It also takes strength to recognise that you’re getting overwhelmed enough that you need to take a step away. It’s valid to want to be stronger than you are now, but I hope you’re able to recognise your small achievements.

Finally, a small bit of practical advice that I’d give is that if you’re entering terminal commands or changing settings to try fix this, it’s super useful to make a note of what you’re doing. Sometimes when I have a complex problem and I try one potential solution that doesn’t end up working, the changes made in that solution can conflict with steps involved in attempting a second solution. It can make it easier to keep track of what you’ve tried so far, especially if you have to undo stuff later. It’s okay if you haven’t done this so far, but it can help going forward. I find that when I’m panicking and desperate for a solution, that makes me more likely to just attempt basically everything, and those are the times when keeping track of what I’ve done is especially important.

Don’t feel guilty for asking for help, or for needing clarifications. We’re all here of our own free will. Many of us have been in your position before, and only got to the point where we are now because of the patient help of kind online nerds. That’s a big part of why I try to chip in when I find someone with a problem I can help with — it feels like giving back to the community that helped me to learn back when I was new to this.

I know it doesn’t feel like it, but you’re doing well. Keep trying, and I promise things will get easier. Don’t beat yourself up for needing to take breaks, or for feeling overwhelmed. How you’re feeling right now is within the range of what’s normal for new people running into a difficult technical problem like this. You’re not stupid, this stuff is just hard.

I agree with the ethical standpoint of banning Generative AI on the grounds that it’s trained on stolen artist data, but I’m not sure how tenable “trained on stolen artist data” is as a technical definition of what is not acceptable.

For example, if a model were trained exclusively on licensed works and data, would this be permissible? Intuitively, I’d still consider that to be Generative AI (though this might be a moot point, because the one thing I agree with the tech giants on is that it’s impractical to train Generative AI systems on licensed data because of the gargantuan amounts of training data required)

Perhaps it’s foolish of me to even attempt to pin down definitions in this way, but given how tech oligarchs often use terms in slippery and misleading ways, I’ve found it useful to try pin terms down where possible

Yeah, that was my understanding of things too. What I’m curious about is how the Indie Game awards define it. Because if games that use ((Procedural Generation) AND NOT (Generative AI)) are permitted, then that would surely require a way of cleanly delineating between Generative AI and the rest of procedural generation that exists beyond generative AI

I’m not so much talking about machine learning being implemented in the final game, but rather used in the development process.

For example, if I were to attempt a naive implementation of procedurally generated terrains, I imagine I’d use noise functions to create variety (which I wouldn’t consider to be machine learning). However, I would expect that this would end up producing predictable results, so to avoid that, I could try chucking in a bunch of real world terrain data, and that starts getting into machine learning.

A different, less specific example I can imagine a workflow for is reinforcement learning. Like if the developer writes code that effectively says "give me terrain that is [a variety of different parameters], then when the system produces that for them, they go “hmm, not quite. Needs more [thing]”. This iterative process could, of course, be done without any machine learning, if the dev was tuning the parameters themselves at each stage, but it seems plausible to me that it could use machine learning (which would involve tuning model hyperparameters rather than parameters).

You make a good point about procedural generation at runtime, and I agree that this seems unlikely to be viable. However, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t used in the development process though in at least some cases. I’ll give a couple of hypothetical examples using real games, though I emphasise that I do not have grounds to believe that either of these games used machine learning during development, and that this is just a hypothetical pondering.

For instance, in Valheim, maps are procedurally generated. In the meadows biome, you can find raspberry bushes. Another feature of the meadows biome is that it occasionally has large clearings that are devoid of trees, and around the edges of these clearings, there is usually a higher rate of raspberry bushes. When I played, I wondered why this was the case — was it a deliberate design decision, or just an artifact of how the procedural generation works? Through machine learning, it could in theory, be both of these things — the devs could tune the hyperparameters a particular way, and then notice that the output results in raspberry bushes being more likely to occur in clusters on the edge of clearings, which they like. This kind of process would require any machine learning to be running at runtime

Another example game is Deep Rock Galactic. I really like the level generation it uses. The biomes are diverse and interesting, and despite having hundreds of hours in the game, there are very few instances that I can remember seeing the level generation being broken in some way — the vast majority of environments appear plausible and natural, which is impressive given the large number of game objects and terrain. The level generation code that runs each time a new map is generated has a heckton of different parameters and constraints that enable these varied and non-broken levels, and there’s certainly no machine learning being used at runtime here, but I can plausibly imagine machine learning being useful in the development process, for figuring out which parameters and constraints were the most important ones (especially because too many will cause excessive load times for players, so reducing that down would be useful).

Machine learning certainly wouldn’t be necessary in either of these examples, but it could be something that could make certain parts of development easier.

Can someone help me to understand the difference between Generative AI and procedural generation (which isn’t something that’s relevant for Expedition 33, but I’m talking about in general).

Like, I tend to use the term “machine learning” for the legit stuff that has existed for years in various forms, and “AI” for the hype propelled slop machines. Most of the time, the distinction between these two terms is pretty clean, but this area seems to be a bit blurry.

I might be wrong, because I’ve only worked with machine learning in a biochemistry context, but it seems likely that modern procedural generation in games is probably going to use some amount of machine learning? In which case, would a developer need to declare usage of that? That feels to me like it’s not what the spirit of the rule is calling for, but I’m not sure

Ooh, Barnsley! That’s actually super close to where I hail from (we had a Barnsley phone number and post code, despite not technically being in Barnsley). That’s so cool, it’s not the kind of place you typically see depicted in media

“Northern Englishest”

As a Yorkshire lass living in Manchester, you have me intrigued with this description. Hell, I’m more than intrigued — you’ve sold me on it

I’ve not played Factorio Space Age yet, but I’m looking forward to it whenever I next get a hankering for Factorio.

Your pitch has sold me on it. Yet another game to add to my wishlist

That sounds like a space version of Eco, with the roles stuff. In Eco, it’s impossible for one person to acquire all skills, so people on a server have to specialise.

I started out as a miner, to honour my late best friend who was a dwarf at heart and would definitely have been a miner if he’d been playing with us. Then I branched out into masonry to make use of the absurd amounts of stone I’d been mining. If I wanted something made of wood, I had to go flutter my eyelashes at my friend who had started out as a logger and branched into carpentry. I enjoyed having a domain that was my own, and a clear way to be useful to the server. Other players had some level of mining and masonry skill by the midgame, but for anything serious, they had to wait until I was online.

It sounds like Space Station 14 is far more hectic than this, but in an interesting way. I wonder if it will scratch the same itch that Eco did wrt being useful in a clear role