He/Him Jack of all trades, master of none

Proudly banned from lemmy.ml for a) being critical of the CCP and b) being against the unlawful deportation of American minorities

  • 0 Posts
  • 955 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 10th, 2023

help-circle
  • I credit Kerbal Space Program for my ability to think in three dimensions. Without KSP, I would have been some kind of dumbass. I thought getting to orbit was just a matter of going up until I was like 18 years old

    Have you ever pulled up an old save file to look at the stuff you used to design? I did that the other day and found out that I used to be good at this game. Folded space stations, massive mining rigs, Apollo Style landers, a beautiful SSTO that’s braindead easy to fly, an interplanetary module that can dock to the back of said SSTO, I made fancy shit. Nowadays I just slap boosters and docking ports on fuel tanks and call it good enough

    I gotta post pictures from that save file sometime






  • My only gripe is that the game gave me all kinds of freedom choose my character’s backstory, but I had to treat Owen like he was some kinda moron. Motherfucker let me give him my Colossus, I never use it and he will be impervious in it

    No, he’s not ready, and my character does everything in her power to ensure that he never will be. Owen did nothing wrong. He “stole” the Javelin of Dawn, and surpise surprise he’s a competent pilot. I only wish I could have supported him the entire time








  • Damn, guess I’m writing a whole response anyway

    Nope. Procedural generation requires a lot of creative and technical input on the part of the developer. It’s not used to offload creative or intellectual work, it creates creative and intellectual work. The intellectual work is something I forgot to mention in that reply, but the loss of the intellectual effort is just as bad as the loss of the creativity.

    Let’s compare the topic of this discussion with the game I’m currently playing, Kerbal Space Program.

    Contracts in Kerbal Space Program’s career mode are (for the most part) procedurally generated. There are a few mission types, usually asking the player to bring a part or set of parts to a particular location and perform some action with them. Attach a part to a satellite in orbit around Duna, take pressure readings in flight over Kerbin, plant a flag on the Mun, etc. This is not offloading creativity onto the machine, this is using procedural generation to provide the player with an endless variety of objectives. Producing this system of procedurally generated missions required creativity and forethought from the developers. I don’t work at Squad, but I imagine it took a number of manhours to set all of the parameters and limitations for the system, and to test it to make sure it works, and that it doesn’t generate any missions that are impossible to complete.

    Contrast that with the AI generated text that is the topic of this discussion. The creative input for that text up there was something along the lines of “generate some sci-fi technobabble that would fit in a starship’s event log” and “do it again, but don’t talk about the ship, just talk about astronomical data.” I know this for certain, because I generated a nearly identical passage using those two prompts exactly. They could have gotten a freelance sci-fi author to write these few bits of text, or even just sat down for 10 minutes and wrote it themselves. It would cost them nearly nothing, and in exchange they would have a piece of text that fits within the world and was written by a human. Instead, they offloaded that creative work onto a machine. They didn’t make more work for themselves like a developer that uses procedural generation, they made less work for themselves by asking a machine to do it instead.

    I could make a similar contrast between this and basically any procedurally generated system in games. Minecraft, Daggerfall, Borderlands, FTL: Faster than Light, Slay the Spire, Dead Cells, all of these games use procedural generation to complement the creative and technical work they put into the games, not to avoid having to do that work in the first place.







  • If it doesn’t make games bad, then the complaints are simply invalid and bandwagoning, and developers cannot be faulted for using it. LOL

    “If slavery doesn’t harm the economy, then the complaints are simply invalid and bandwagoning, and plantation owners cannot be faulted for using them. LOL”

    I know Lemmings have a lot of trouble reading, so I’ll get this out of the way now: no, I’m not saying that generative AI is slavery, nor am I saying they’re equivalent. I’m drawing one similarity to make a point. That’s called a simile. The point being, that one supposed criticism isn’t valid doesn’t mean that no criticisms are valid.