demagogue

If I were doing this, I would play them chronologically, so you could get a feel for the state of the art when an FM dropped. And over time the field generally gets better, so it won't be as hit or miss. Also of course it naturally keeps you from inadvertently playing FMs out of order.

This is an irrelevant aside but... That wiki article had one of the most enlightening things I've been wanting to know about for a long time in it an almost throwaway little aside in the 2nd paragraph of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_angle s#properties ... which after a little following up through some of the linked wiki pages is (I think; it's nuanced math, so I'm never entirely sure) that the quantum spin of a particle is a feature of a 3D rotations in a 4D rotation space, which (again if I understand it) is very close to our Euclidian intuitions that contiguous bodies rotate together (in S^3 space), except the rotation space it actually fills up (RP^3) has these isolated 0D points that also "have rotation". I'd been trying to figure out since forever what quantum spin really was because it's crazy at face value. But seeing it as just a natural & necessary property of rotation symmetry, which is all a particle is (Poincare symmetries), somehow makes me feel better about it. It isn't so unintuitive and arbitrary seeming now. I mean imagining how space really works is still odd, but it fits the math of everything else happening in a particle like a champ, and word on the street is that spatial relations are a property of symmetry relations & not the other way around anyway. It's just funny that I'd find it in a thread following up on a game coding question of all things, after trying to understand it through so many other routes after countless direct searches and reading tutorials. Okay, sorry for the aside. I felt moved to say something to someone about it.

That's a fair reason for a person to not pay attention to the Stealth Score, but I think it still has value. Regarding the FM-size issue, we moved it to an additive system so it goes up forever for that reason. It's like golf. Big FMs can have big par values, and small FMs can have a small par value. I even tried to get the community to come up with par values for every FM to standardize it, and I still think that's a fun idea. The value of having the code tell you something you probably already know is because then the game is officially registering your victory, which for some people gives a nice feeling of recognition for their effort, and for others, it allows them to post a screenshot of the Score to verify their accomplishment, e.g., in a ghosting run tread. But it's a small part of the stat screen, so no real bother to anyone anyway. I agreed with all of that. I'm all for more discussion of issues an author might not have thought about. In that respect it's a kind of extended beta-testing, which is a really important part of the process making a map, and no reason in principle it can't continue even after it's been released. It's just changing something without their input that crosses the line.

The problem is alert attribution. A mere alert state elevation, e.g., the guard seeing non-player enemy, should NOT count towards the player's Stealth Score! Don't do that! If the stealth score registration applies only to guards seeing absence markers, then I think there are good arguments on both sides whether a guard alert should register against the player. It's in a similar category as AI seeing blood, bodies, and weapons. But in this case I think it's okay to count to the stealth score because other AI can kill other AI, but other AI do not steal, so unlike the other examples, the absence marker is uniquely the player's fault in the game. So making only that count to the stealth score is fair I think. But yes, some bark or other indication would also be fair. Re: the proposal for the spawnarg for guard's noticing loot being removed, I think it should not be removed IMO because now you're directly contradiction a design decision made by an author. You can criticize the author and say that's a stupid mechanic, sure, or there are cases where there are bugs and the design intention isn't be followed that should be fixed to meet the intention, but I think intentional design decisions that work as intended should never be changed because authors should have absolute autonomy over their own design. Edit: Informing authors that that mechanic can ruin ghosting runs, which many players value, and then leaving it up to them to decide whether or not to change it for that reason, that's a valid thing to try to do IMO, as long as its the author's final decision what to do. Edit2: There is an argument there to leave it alone too. It punishes the player by putting the guard on alert to create more challenge, but it doesn't count to the stealth score so people can still do ghosting runs & be validated for them according to traditional ghosting rules, which have never counted stolen loot to a ghosting bust. So that's the argument to tolerate guards going on alert seeing stolen loot but it not counting to the stealth score. And it's a good argument IMO, since the stealth score has always been linked to people caring about ghosting attempts, or how close they can get to it, and it follows the rules better. Don't fix what isn't broken.

I guess I'll put this here for the record for now. There's a console command to turn on text on the screen that shows the AI state, including stims, their current alert state, the ramp down, etc. If we were trying to properly debug this, one of the first things we'd do is turn that on and make a video reproducing the bug. There's also a debugging way to turn on the stealth score as well, so you can see what it's doing at the same time. Then it's just a matter of paying close attention the values in line with the events in the video, and that often gives enough clues about what's happening in the code to track the problem down. If you wanted to track it down, you'd look up the commands to do that. Short of that, you could just make a regular video reproducing the bug and we could go from there.

Oh I left out a part I was going to mention that might explain that. The alert has to be attributable to the player. Stims carry an attribution tag. Obviously the player shouldn't be penalized for a guard seeing another enemy. But part of that IIRC is if there's something like a body or a blood stain or a weapon, etc., that the AI sees, there's nothing tagged to the object that's connected to the player. And it's not something you can even easily hack as an attribution system is, well, an attribution system. This may explain what you were seeing. It could be something else, but that's what occurs to me. (The cascade effect was solved by clever coding, and it definitely counts towards stealth score. So that wouldn't be the source of that problem at least.)

In the stats screen, there is a little arrow at the bottom and if you click it, it takes you to a new page that actually breaks down your stealth score into exactly which alerts were added. It's what thebigh said. The AI have a 5-state alert system, so there's just a multiplier for each level. Level 1 was left off because it's just too sensitive. In some FMs it's already busted right when the FM starts, and it kind of defeats the purpose of a score if a perfect is impossible just because of the mission design. And it's also following traditional ghosting rules. The basic rule is, you're busted if someone "knows a person was there", which only starts from level 2. One of the goals was to allow players to say they ghosted a mission when they get a 0 stealth score. One interesting tidbit behind the scenes was that it's actually pretty complex to design the system because alerts usually don't occur once. It's usually a cascade of dozens of alerts as an AI in pursuit keeps seeing you in front of him. So we (I say we but grayman did most of the heavy lifting, but we had a lot of back and forth discussion about how to make it work) had to design it so an alert was like a discrete event. An alert only counts the highest peak. So it doesn't add the progression through levels 1, 2, 3 if it hits 4. It just counts "4" as the highest hit. And AI have to completely ramp down and stay ramped down for some time period, and then be retriggered from an unalerted state for it to count as a new alert, otherwise it's treated as the "same alert". I learned a lot about designing real world systems for code to handle it in a sensible and satisfying way from grayman for this project. What a hero. I can't say enough good things about him.

What you described is standard practice in the industry. You're supposed to start with rough brushwork first, laying out the entire level in a rough block form, see if it works, change what you need to, and then you take progressive passes developing and later detailing each area with modular set piece meshes or more detailed brushwork absent that.

A Halloween theme would be awesome but it's admittedly tight. You could do a three or five room contest and get a good number of entries that fast though.

Just in terms of the raw tech, human brains still have ~8 orders of magnitude more nodes or multiplications (10K vs 1Q synapses I think it was), even assuming you equated nodes between neural nets, which is misleading, but it still handwaves at the distance artificial neural nets lag behind in pure information terms. We're still in earthworm territory and need high end graphics cards to crunch that much. That's not a mysterian argument, but it has a similar punchline. When your model lags that far behind, it may as well be magic what the brain can do in comparison. It's interesting that you can do (what seem to us like) really high level things, like this procedural art, chess engines, and probably music and other forms soon, with an earthworm sized brain; but really (what seem to us like) simple things, like ordering lunch at a fast food joint or other open ended things, run into the AI Complete problem, i.e., you can't even do the most simple operation unless you have full human-level cognition and world knowledge.

From what I've been reading in the AI lit, the next step is rapidly integrating new information into the network weights with some tricks to avoid the so-called catastrophic forgetting problem, more in the Grossbergian version of neural nets to get a little technical about it, more in the way human memory actually works. Humans also don't save visual images verbatim either, but they're procedurally recreated in memory on demand. Basically what it means is you can get your local AI to look at a work of art or music and it'll recalibrate its weights so it can "recall" it later based on some lightweight cue like "that painting I uploaded on (date & time)". I mean the user doesn't even have to know it's not a direct save and it got embedded in AI weights. ------- I remember in high school and college reading the claptrap from some futurists about the coming Singularity, and laughing it off, not even whether we were actually approaching it, but that the very idea itself felt kind of too outlandish to buy. But now I'm starting to get a sense of what it might actually be like to reach that point, when AI have integrated knowledge way beyond what humans can follow, and humans having direct and instant access to it, they just take it for granted like it was an extension of themselves. Or something like that. I'm still not sure how it may play out if at all.

I can imagine when this tech goes into the third dimension it'll be a big sea change. I can even imagine in the future the tech procedurally generating the gameplay along with it, so you can just generate a whole game world, characters, & gameplay. I don't know if the tech for storytelling will be up to scratch on the large scale, it's lagging so far, but on the small scale I could see it convincing enough. ----- What's been striking me most is that there's just such a flood of it. I have my folders of AI art... Actually I started them like 10 years ago, but I only ever collected a few things more for the gimmick of it than it actually looking good. But now I've already got masses of really interesting works in them and find masses more every day. But I think there's a point where there's just too much. That's what I think is going to be the big issue on the social and economic level. There's so much that one can only take so much in, and what does that do for anyone or anything else that wants to squeeze into that space.

Y'all should visit the MidJourney discord channel if you haven't already. The other big thing, the FOSS one, is Stable Diffusion. That's what I've been using (via the hugging space demo, which doesn't use a credit system), and it's typically awesome once you know what you're doing. But I don't know where people are posting it in a single place. It's coming fast and thick now. I'd say half of it is awesome, and the other near half is awesome but there's some little screwy bit you could fix up in a half hour. Then maybe 10% are duds. Of course the posts are going to be biased on the awesome end just because they've been filtered. The other thing I've noticed is suddenly a ton of art on Twitter and FB is AI art, and again it's typically great. Yeah, art belongs to the computers now. You can be in denial about it, and it'll take the next year or two to really settle in. But I think the die has been cast now.

There's always two relevant versions of the source code, the version for the latest release and the WIP version. If you're in it for learning early on, if you want to do small little experiments where you just swap new source code in and out without changing assets, or if you have space issues or want to keep things compact, or if it's on some really niche or independent part of the game that updates probably won't touch it, etc., then the release version may be fine for your purposes. But if you want to get into it seriously, at some point you'll want the WIP version as an independent install, anyway, because it's kind of self-defeating to work on code that's already been made incompatible, and once you do it, it frees you up to do lots of different things without worrying about what it's doing to the game you also want to play sometimes. As an aside, I really encourage people to play with the source code. You learn a lot about coding generally, since it's always best to learn by doing, and by doing something you're interested in instead of boring textbook problems. And the kinds of experiments you can run on TDM tend to be fun because, as an immersive sim, there are just a lot of fun things you can do with the game and the world. I think a good way to start, after reading through the code a bit to get a feel for where things are, is to give yourself some random small assignments, like putting in little features or gimmicks, and then search the code for the elements that seem like they'd be most relevant for that thing. And then as you start tweaking things, the problems you run into are going to be teaching you how things fit together. It's a fun way to learn though.

I've been using Stable Diffusion a lot recently. Something you have to note is the current way to use it, you should expect to make 20~30 versions. One of them is going to be awesome. The other thing is that you often have to re-do wonky parts, which most of these systems are starting to do. I mean maybe 60% of it will be right on, so you keep that and fix up the wonky bits until they fit. So you're not getting perfection on the first run. You're iterating the same image in bits in pieces, each block taking 20 iterations or so. Someone was saying it before .... hands, feet, legs, eyes, will look a little wonky. So you just drag a box over it and start iterating, and eventually it will get it right. By the end of that you're going to start getting close to perfection. We have the tech for that already now. It may take a little time, but you can get perfection with what we have now if you block iterate it enough. And the final thing is, look at what Dall-E was making just 1~2 years ago. It was trash, and what we have now is lightyears already beyond it. In another 3~5 years I think it'll meet the hype, and every thing churning out of it will be photo real or whatever you're looking for, and then some. I don't think it'll take that long to get there just looking at the differential slope of the progress we're seeing right where we are now. I think of it like chess engines. There was that period where people were wondering if it'd beat humans, and then it did, and then it just kept going without looking backwards until at this point the entire chess world looks like it's going to run into a crisis of conscience because the game is out of human hands now. There's every reason to expect imaging software is going to do the same thing in short order. For gaming, e.g., I'm making a card game, and this is helping me make the background and card images. Again it's taking like 20~30 iterations, and then I have to fix a few things by hand, but I can churn out a half dozen really good looking cards in a day where I wouldn't have been able to make a single one before. But like I said, I expect in 5 years I won't even need many iterations or the hand-fixing... I think the fixing will be automated well enough. Oh another thing is, because it's still diffusion over a data set, the big limits are users not understanding the ontology embedded in the set. If you figure out good search terms, you can get what you want much better. Another thing I think will improve in the future isn't only the tech, but the search terms and other UI elements will work much better to make the system give you quality work that you want, by improving the data set, but also you can have a second-order of AI that parses text inputs into a form that works with the data set. I think that's part of the next generation of AI that's going to make it start much better delivering to us on a human level. I mean I think the tech is already there now in principle. Now it's a matter of making the tech work for humans, and that'll be the next big revolution coming soon.

I was busy before and missed this (the Seeking Lady Leicester WIP screenshots), so I guess it's good this thread was bumped. It looks really great! I'm excited to play it! I'm really happy there is this outlet for us to see part of grayman's great legacy still emerging in a way that respects and even fulfills his wishes. And I'm happy we have reached this approach with Biker for him to contribute to the community in a way that's safe, controlled, and ultimately healthier for Biker & the forum. It's working great. Don't change a thing. Above all I'm happy we have great FMs still being worked on and coming out. They really are the best medicine when everything else in the world seems to be falling apart. The SEED system was created exactly for this purpose, it looks great when it's used, very realistic, and it should be used more often!

Edit: Oh, I guess I thought I was on the last page when I posted this and I wasn't. Well anyway, since we can't delete posts, here's a reply to a probably year's old post now... For my FM I mentioned a key window being openable in a readable, and I put a loading screen message that some windows were openable. I think I also put a slight light in front of the openable windows, or some of them, so they popped out. I wasn't such a fan at the time of the meta-diegetic route (some with knobs and some without), and leaving one open seemed counter-productive for performance reasons, but performance was a much bigger deal when I made it than it is now.

Oh nosound may be a sound shader too. I was working with "silence" the sound file & associated sound shader for my own project, and the function nosound in the code itself (where it means what I said). But if you saw nosound as a soundshader, then I'm sure you were right in what you saw, and if you want to know the difference, you could open up the soundshaders and see. Also note that I worked on this stuff ages ago, so you don't have to trust everything I'm saying too much. I just get a kick when people talk about code I worked on and I want to talk about it. Yeah the stereo issue came up later, and I'm glad somebody took care of it!

To be technical about it, "nosound" is a script function to stop a speaker. "Silence" is an actual sound .wav file that plays nothing, so you can still have the speaker "play" an arbitrary .wav file, e.g., for the ambient system, then use that to easily not get a sound, as you might do in the popping case as mentioned... Or that was the theory. (The popping problem was fixed after I added that, but I was never 100% sure that was the fix that did it.) But the issue in any event now is that now countless maps already use "silence" references in their location_settings spawnargs, and it's dicey changing things that mappers add themselves because they won't update with TDM changes, e.g, as opposed to using stock resources that automatically carry TDM changes with them into new versions.

If you'll allow me to take a bird's eye view of this ... remember back in 2016, when they nutcakes were campaigning for Brexit in the UK and Trump in the US? The joke back then was, no matter how crazy one side got, the other had to outdo it. And I was wondering which flavor of crazy was going to be more permanently damaging to their respective country. At the time I thought it was going to be Brexit, since that's "forever" and Trump was only 4 or 8 years, but I underestimated how deeply Trump's admin could undermine all of our institutions., even after he's left. But then I also underestimated the wreckage that was going to be left in Brexit's wake. ------- Fast forward 6 years later and I'm still not sure who has the worse deal. Even if this law doesn't pass, it seems like it's putting on display how dysfunctional UK politics is now, like the ultimate exercise in dissociation -- trying so hard to ignore how shambolic the post-Brexit political & economic situation is by hyperfixating on problems that aren't problems with truly batshit legislation. (You can correct me if my reading of it is off.) But if you've been paying attention to the Jan 6 hearings in the US, you know the US still won't be outdone. The problem isn't that the hearings are bad. The problem is that they're a slam dunk case against the previous administration and GOP, but it's only (apparently) making the whole GOP circle the wagons and double down on their insanity. Not to mention the SCOTUS decision that's going to allow the criminalization of abortions, the arguments behind it could just as easily apply to criminalize birth control, or gay or transgender behavior, and I have to imagine in some states there's a sizeable part of the population chomping on the bit to do just that. ------- On the topic of this law itself, of course it's a mess. It's weirdly chauvinistic. UK-legal-compliant browsers & the extraterritorial bit? Didn't the UK just go to a lot of effort to tell everybody it was done with multilateralism and would be much happier as a fading second rate power? It's a tall order to follow that up with this. But the big problem is the part about net neutrality. The more control the state wrangles the Internet into, the more it's just going to whip it into some propaganda mouthpiece for megalomaniac & tyrannical demagogues (& not the benevolent kind like me). I'm all for strict measures to protect children from child pornography, get it off the net, and punish anybody uploading it or any server or site hosting it. But forcing people to maintain their identity for sites is asking for people to be targeted, tracked, and coerced, or putting in the architecture to do that when the bad guys get into power. The problem is even if this law fails, I think they may keep trying until they make it work. This is all a stupid road to dystopia we're on.

My memory may be failing me, but I thought there was a key you could press so that frob helper turned on while it was pressed. It may have been that somebody gave instructions to bind a key to do that job through the console. But anyway I really liked that system. It would stay off, but when I needed it, I could press that button and have it when I needed and wanted it. (And IIRC this is what I've done, but it was already a few years ago now(?), so I don't remember all that well. I did try it with it always on for a while, reflected on it, and still didn't like it, XD or didn't like it popping up when I wasn't asking for it. But I liked being able to easily turn it on & off. But this is just me; I don't presume to speak for a whole demographic or anything.) And like I said before, the team can do whatever it feels is best as long as I or anyone can still set that up, or set it up however they like.

I was using the term more metaphorically. There was a design philosophy. Whatever the literal doc itself said wasn't really the point. Well I shouldn't have referred to it as such since it wouldn't be on point anyway. Most things got pounded out in the dev forum across countless threads, but that's harder to explain. I was using the term "design doc" as a cheaty shorthand so I wouldn't have to explain. XD Anyway, long story short, if there's a vote among the devs to change a thing, I trust everyone on the team has the best interest of the game in mind, so of course it's proper they can change something like this that way. I wouldn't vote for it, but I'd respect the vote and be fine as long as I could turn it off. I think one characteristic of this as opposed to the light gem or inventory widget is that at the end of the day this is reticle, and reticles carry a lot of baggage with them in games. Somehow they change the relationship of the player to the game space, at least with my feeling of them. I always turn off reticles in any game I play for that reason (although like I said before, I'll cheat sometimes and turn them on in rare cases; but I don't like them in any game as a rule). So that's one part of this.

I was thinking about things like frobbing coins and doors, but you're right about containers being an innovation, and more generally that realism and era don't match up all that well when you get down to details. But that wasn't really part of my point, so it's best to rephrase it. The point is there is a category of player that hates screen bling, or will say they hate it (we're really talking about a whole philosophy towards games & immersive sims), and that type would view TDM is the kind of game where you can get relief from it (etc.). I don't know the best way to summarize that in bumper sticker form for a button. Any way you try there are going to be problems, like you're saying. But it's still a real category. I'm open to suggestions for the best way to succinctly describe what it is. I was trying to throw a bone to people that don't like the default and wanted another option that worked for the other player type that says frob-hassle is a pointless frustration, but I agree with this. Having some big-scale option setting moment is a bad idea, so I'd even retract the suggestion. But that would just lead me back to: ideally we keep it the way it is because it's consistent with the design doc from the very beginning. You can't micromanage or tweak a design philosophy forever; it's a kind of endless feature creep. Now that I think about it, that's probably closer to the root issue. There are always pros and cons with different features. And here if you're talking about two different types of attitude, which the same person can even go back & forth on, you can't win. But at a certain point a feature becomes part of the character of the game, so it's best to stick with it. That's only my view though. (And I like that frob help is an option out there I can use sometimes.) Of course another option is what Springheel likes to do with his loading screens, which is having hint texts on the Main Menu screen that inform players they can do stuff like this that they might never notice otherwise. That's a good idea for other reasons because there are quite a few things that would be hard for players to know but which they may find really useful.

The options I think might be good are, 1, if they made it default at the start for, or it's explained in the tutorial mission, which a lot of people play their first time. Then people know how to turn it on & off when they want it either way. The other option would be a setting-setting that comes on with a first install with a prompt like "what kind of experience [or UI] do you want: 1. An authentic or more realistic experience closest to the classics in this genre, 2. a UI designed to make game play more accessible and fun with less hassle, and then the system picks different sets of options based on one's answer to that. It's obvious or anyway intuitive to me that people in the "1" camp are going to be alienated by these features and people in the "2" camp would find it hard to understand why anyone wouldn't want them. Part of our entire MO in our design doc from the start was to make the experience as pared down and closest to reality as reasonable, with UI features putting things in the world just to the extent the medium was limited in giving world-feedback to the player. More to the point, it didn't like the turn to screen bling that started happening after 2004, so made an intentional point of limiting the bling to what was necessary.