Valve revolutionized Linux gaming; Tim categorically rejects it.
Valve banned shitcoins and blockchain scams; Tim welcomed them with open arms.
Valve enforces honesty regarding AI slop; Tim wants to literally deceive people.
All that on top of what they did with third-party exclusives.
He’s like that annoying kid who didn’t get invited to a birthday party and vowed to always do the opposite of what the popular kid does. Petulant fucking overgrown child.
I hear people say this sometimes, but I don’t know what they mean. Is there part of Valve’s system that has a gambling mechanic I’ve just never engaged with?
Or is it one of their games that has gambling?
Because I’ve been using it for years as basically my sole gaming interface and haven’t seen any gambling.
Mainly Team Fortress 2 and Counter Strike GO/2, cuz both of them have cosmetics with rarities obtained via what effectively amounts to lootboxes. In one sense they also have an out-of-game economy around these things where these items are traded for actual money
There is a massive secondary market for in-game items (primarily CS skins) that Valve refuses to combat or even officially acknowledge. Some of it is legitimate, some of it is literal lottery for children. And since every transaction takes place on Steam, they get a cut of that.
The short version is that an enormous, multibillion dollar gambling industry has been built around Valve’s item marketplace, and in particular around CS:GO skins. If that sounds completely insane and stupid, I’m with you, but it exists. Valve takes their typical cut off of all of these trades, and thus derives massive profits from it.
I think difference is EA is more a game company so people see a game they like then judge the monetization because its a full priced game that turns out to have f2p monetization.
But, Valve is more judged for its experience as a launcher and less for its games. So with the launcher itself being the draw things like Valve game lootboxes can be something people are completely unexposed to as they play other games.
But, EA is still at a stage where the products that receive the most visibility are their games, and the launcher and services side so underwhelming it isn’t a selling point.
Its like Costco versus a company known for its pizza. Costco is a warehouse store people love going to that happens to sell pizza, but is judged on multiple things that draw them there over other stores as opposed to pizza. A pizza company is just known primarily for its pizza so judged on the quality of their pizza.
Gambling mechanic is as impactful to me as Costco selling alcohol and junk food. I don’t play those games, so only reason I’m even aware of it is because of people bringing it up. Those who seek it out can get it those who come for other things can avoid it.
And I like the steam launcher when it comes to linux compatibility, steam workshop, reviews, categorizing my games, note function, and gamepad support. I absolutely would not want to go back to the old days of CDs for games. Too many to manage and keep track of. And I like my Steam Deck for introducing me to Linux gaming, and being one of the few launchers that actually has Linux support and doesn’t need to rely on third party work arounds.
Those who don’t value that can buy from Epic or other launchers the way some people don’t see the difference buying from Costco vs Walmart and see membership fees as a waste of money. Or go over to consoles to be free of launchers entirely.
I’d say the only thing that bothers me about Steam is that you can’t completely ignore updates for games, so have to go into offline mode or save a copy then update then replace the directory or use steam console to retrieve the old version if you accidentally updated. That’s been my only gripe as a Steam user for games like Skyrim where I don’t want updates.
I don’t want to discredit Steam’s features like compatibility layers, but the software itself is a mess. It is an unnessecary RAM-heavy chromium instance, to be fair, just like most other launchers. I replaced it with Playnite which is streamlined, responsive and more feature rich for managing a library (Steam still needs to be installed of course because they don’t offer offline installer like GOG). And I’d argue that console user saren’t free of launcher, they are locked into a very specific one.
But as someone who’s neither been to Costco nor Walmart, what is the difference?
Bingo! Valve is one hell of a monopoly, but they don’t totally fuck their customers. Sweeney has to answer to his shareholders. Those are the real customers; not you and me.
Both Valve and Epic are private companies and thus have a bit more of a say over what they do than public companies would. Sweeney actually just answers to himself, and I mean that pejoratively, otherwise he would have invested in EGS more to compete with Steam and focused more on Unreal Engine’s near-monopoly in the AAA space.
Instead, he focused on “owning” the metaverse, and courting crypto. If I were a shareholder, I would say he wasn’t acting in my best interests.
No, I want worker protections, regulatory enforcement, and broad public distrust of the exploitative owner class who are using AI to extract more wealth while destroying the environment we all live in.
Patronizing “AI” systems is collaboration with the worst garbage of the human race, the robber barons who are comfortable killing people for quarterly profits.
People like Peter Theil, Elon Musk and Sam Altman.
Tbf AI tag should be about AI-generated assets. Cause there is no problem in keeping code quality while using AI, and that’s what the whole dev industry do now.
The killer app is language processing and if a localization contractor isn’t using an LLM to quickly check for style errors and inconsistencies, they’re just making it hard for them for no good reason.
there is no problem in keeping code quality while using AI
This opinion is contradicted by basically everyone who has attempted to use models to generate useful code which must interface with existing codebases. There are always quality issues, it must always be reviewed for functional errors, it rarely interoperates with existing code correctly, and it might just delete your production database no matter how careful you try to be.
I feel like I get where he’s coming from, but I can see the revulsion.
I picture someone asking their AI to write a rules engine for a gamemode and getting masses of duplicative, horrific code; but in my own work, my company has encouraged an assistive tool, and once it has an idea of what I’m trying to do, it will offer autocomplete options that are pretty spot on.
Still, I very much agree it’s hard to sort the difference and in untrained hands can definitely lead to unmaintainable code slop. Everything needs to get reviewed by knowledgeable human eyes before running.
The people lazy enough to have ai generate their code aren’t going to do that. You’re acting like games didn’t already have bugs before we invented a mostly wrong shortcut that kinda looks just good enough to fake being useful.
No, the issue with “AI” is thinking that it’s able to make anything production ready, be it art, code or dialog.
I do believe that LLMs have lots of great applications in a game pipeline, things like placeholders and copilot for small snippets work great, but if you think that anything that an LLM produces is production ready and you don’t need a professional to look at it and redo it (because that’s usually easier than fixing the mistakes) you’re simply out of touch with reality.
Tbf AI tag should be about AI-generated assets. Cause there is no problem in keeping code quality while using AI, and that’s what the whole dev industry do now.
At no point did you mention someone approving it.
Also, you should read what I said, I said most large stuff generated by AI needs to be completely redone. You can generate a small function or maybe a small piece of an image, if you have a professional validating that small chunk, but if you think you can generate an entire program or image with LLMs you’re delusional.
Dude are you a software dev? Did you hear about, like, tickets? You are supposed to split bigger task into smaller tickets at a project approval phase.
LLM agents are completely capable of taking well-documented tickets and generating some semblance of code that you shape with a few upcoming prompts, criticising code style & issues until they are all fixed.
I’m not theoretical, this is how it’s done today. MCPs into JIRA and Figma and UI tickets just get about 90% done in a single prompt. Harder stuff is done in “invesrigate and write .md how to solve” & “this is why that won’t work, do this instead” to like 70% ready.
Sorry, I won’t go through your post history to reply to a comment, be clearer on the stuff you write.
I’m a software engineer, and if that’s how you code you’re either wasting time or producing garbage code, which might be acceptable wherever you work, but I guarantee you that you would not pass code reviews where I do. I do use copilot, and it’s good at suggesting small snippets, maybe an if, maybe a function header, but even then 60% of the time I need to change what it suggested. Reviewing code is harder than writing it yourself, even if I could trust that the LLM would do exactly what I asked (which I can’t, not by a long shot) it would maybe be opened to bugs or special cases that I would have to read the code, understand what it tried to do, figure out edge cases on that solution and see if it handled them. In short, it would take me much longer to do stuff via LLMs than writing them myself, because writing code is the easy part of programming, thinking on the solution and it’s limitations and edge cases is the hard part, and LLMs can’t understand that. The moment you describe your solution in sufficient detail that an LLM can possibly generate the right code, you’ve essentially written the code yourself just in a more complicated and ambiguous format, this is what most non technical managers fail to understand, code is just structured English, we’re already writing something better than prompts to an LLM.
Again, your solution should be already thought out and described in tickets and approved tech plan. If it’s not, SDLC problem.
And it’s not true that agents can’t help with edge cases, they can. If you know which points to look at, you task to analyze the specific interaction and watch which parts of the code would be mentioned.
I do write way less amount of symbols to LLM than I would when I write code. Those symbols don’t have to be structured and they can even have typos, so I can focus my brain activity on things that actually matter.
It’s not in the thread line I’m replying to, to get to that I would have had to read another reply, and all of the replies to that to spot yours.
If the work you do can be fully specified in a Jira ticket, you’re a code monkey and not a software engineer, of course you can use LLMs to do your job since you can be replaced by an LLM.
And it’s not true that agents can’t help with edge cases, they can. If you know which points to look at, you task to analyze the specific interaction and watch which parts of the code would be mentioned.
You’re missing my point entirely, it’s not that it can’t help with, it’s that the solution it writes will not take them into account unless you tell it to, and to explain every edge case in enough details to be unambiguous about all of them is essentially the same as writing code directly. Not to mention that you can’t possibly know all of the edge cases of the solution it will write without seeing it, so you can’t directly tell it to watch for edge cases without knowing what code it will write.
I do write way less amount of symbols to LLM than I would when I write code.
Maybe, but then you have to review everything it wrote so you waste more time. Give me one concrete example of something that you can prompt an LLM to give you code that is advanced enough to be worth it (i.e. writing the prompt and reviewing the code it wrote would be faster than writing the code myself) and not generic enough that I would be able to find the answer in stack overflow.
Those symbols don’t have to be structured
If you don’t structure them the LLM might misinterpret what you meant. Structure in a language is required to make things unambiguous, this reminds me of the stupid joke of “go to the store and bring 1L of milk, if they have eggs bring 6” and the programmer coming back with 6L of milk because they had eggs. Of course that’s a stupid example, but anything complex enough to be worth using an LLM would be hard to describe unambiguously and covering all edge cases in normal human speak.
and they can even have typos, so I can focus my brain activity on things that actually matter.
Typos are very easy to correct, most editors will highlight them for you, and some can even autocorrect them but more likely you avoid most of them by using tab completion anyways. I don’t waste any brain activity on that, I’m thinking on the solution and structuring it in an unambiguous way, that is what writing code is, it’s not some cryptic art of writing the proper runes to make the machine do your will like you seem to be implying, it’s just structured thought.
Plus, copilot is shit.
Might be, wouldn’t know any other as that’s the one I have available to use, but sincerely I doubt others are that much better to make a difference.
I rate your post as a skill issue.
Yup, I have absolutely no skill in using LLMs, nor will I waste my time with it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a neat tool for auto completing small snippets like we used to do with an actual snippet library a couple of years ago, it is also a decent tool to navigate unknown code bases asking it where certain parts are or how to achieve something in the. I would say that 60% of the time it gives you some good pointers, but 90% of the time most of the code it writes is wrong, but at least it points you in the right direction of where to start investigating.
I don’t expect you to understand this since from what I’m reading here you probably never worked on anything big enough, but a software engineer job is not to write code, that’s just a side-effect, our job is to solve problems, so either you’re trying to get the LLM to solve the problem for you, or wasting lots of time explaining your solution in English, reading the generated code, understanding it, analyzing it, fixing any issues and testing it, possibly multiple times instead of explaining your solution once in code and testing it.
I’d rather buy a game on Steam than get it for free from Epic. Seriously.
I claimed the first few games and their launcher was shit. Now, to be fair, Steam wasn’t exactly a pinnacle of achievement when it first came out, either, but it’s been refined and honed to a razor. Epic is just “let’s throw shit at the wall and see what happens”, with no coherent strategy or marketing beyond “we’re not Steam!”. Their client, as I understand it, is still shit, and their CEO is a jackass. Haven’t had it installed in years now. Meanwhile, I have a backlog on Steam of like 1000 games.
Why would I ever use Epic? It has no value.
And yes, that goes for games sold on Steam with the “have to use Origin” bullshit, too. I’m not launching Steam to then launch Origin. This is not Inception. Let me play my damn game and stay out of it. Ya know?
I got a few epic games to be claimed on epic store. I just don’t. I don’t have an account and I also do not have a will to make one. Nothing of value is there anyway.
Yep all those people not liking the idea of AI labels telling on themselves. For how much the AI bros talk up AI they are incredibly skittish about having to show what products were created using it. If it is so awesome why the fear?
Like an artist who traces their drawings, but doesn’t want to disclose it so more people will assume they free handed it.
I thought it’s widespread knowledge that the “upgrade” to UE5 mainly brought a lot of performance loss compared to UE4 while having a signature blurry (or whatever) style which actually worsens the perceived quality.
For example expedition 33, while it’s style is awesome, it’s performance is absolutely not. It should run flawless on ps5 and on superior pcs but still doesn’t and the fps range is not in line with the hardware capabilities.
I hate to be the one to say it but an ambitious game made by a small team is a shit game to use as an example. They did not have the budget to optimize and the game is full of small technical flaws.
Who ever told you that UE4 is better than UE5 is wrong, even without Lumen or Nanite.
Also most games in UE4 only used 2k textures and in UE5 8k textures are used. The assets are heavier in general.
I don’t think it’s a shit example. It’s the latest I experienced. It’s a good game but hampered technically. Nobody needs to tell me, I’ve been gaming since before dos and grew up with it; I’ve also been working in it for a few decades.
Look; you could just have a bigger or more gpus with more ram in a pc but if the end result does not significantly look better the question is for what all the effort is.
And that’s what happened with UE5.
Yes, maybe in a few years it might look different but it’s also been some time and hasn’t really been worth any of the performance impact.
And - as said - I see quality impact in UE5 games which I personally can not comprehend in an supposed upgrade.
However, feel free to disagree.
Maybe it’s my background in datacenters: of course you can always meet demand with more raw power but it’s a losing fight and the intelligent progress is to optimize and use resources in a clever way.
While UE5 is a one size fits all for game dev, it does not mean all games have to try to have the highest quality graphics possible. CO took that route. You can do whatever you want and optimize as much as you can.
You are correct, studios are just going ham on the capabilities and not caring about the hardware requirements. Having a min requirements of a 12th Gen intel, 32GB RAM and 3060 is fucked up. And you need 64GB of RAM for good performance.
My biggest gripe on the UE4 vs 5 opinion is that you can still make a low-fi game that runs at 200fps. It’s a design choice not an engine choice.
Some people don’t like to hear it, but Fortnite is basically the new Unreal Tournament… in the same way it’s the new Rockband. For the latter, it’s easy: Epic acquired Rockband and Guitar Hero creator Harmonix, and Fortnite Festival is just the latest version of that code, only you can’t use instrument controllers with it, only gamepads (or, I suppose, keyboards or touch screens). So what Fortnite really is, it’s a free-to-play showcase of the Unreal Engine. It’s meant to show off what it can do and anyone can pick it up and play for free. Of course, it doesn’t have all the features of Unreal Tournament. It’s pretty much just battle royale with base building. But it’s the newest version of the same engine and it’s a shooter. Not the same thing… but your skills with older UT definitely translate. My nephew got me to play it. I’d never played it before, and he had spent money on the skins and the extra stuff, so he would go around making big purple explosions and he’d attract attention. Me, I was blown away by the detail, but I found the movement just as fluid as I remembered. Once I got the hang of weapons and their grades, I was scouting out the best pistols and SMGs I could find, and shadowing his character, and when he got into fights, I’d circle around, flank his enemies, and we’d win every fight. We won our first match and I don’t think we’ve lost a match. If we did, we finished in the top 5-10%. We have an unconventional playstyle, and it’s really all me. He plays like most Fortnite players, and they engage him as such. I play like a UT player… or, more accurately, I play it like a Deus Ex player (which was based on the same UE1 that UT99 was). I pick my shots and I shoot to kill. My nephew doesn’t think I’m playing the game right, but he’s having fun and he likes winning.
That said, I don’t love the game. I keep it on my Xbox, but I only play with him (or, I suppose, I’d be open to playing with anyone who asked). Even solo (I did that once on my iPhone when Fortnite came back to iOS this year or last) I still do alright for myself. Rarely take the top spot though. I need a decoy. But if there are 100 players, there’s no shame in being in the last 5 of them.
Oh, so you have to buy new ones? Yeah, no. I have Xbox 360 and Xbox One (RB3 and RB4 era) instruments and neither generation work. I’m not buying a new guitar for Fortnite. That’s crazy.
I heard there’s a new guitar controller out (Gibson?), some like 20th anniversary thing? And I’m wondering who this is for. These games are dead.
YARG and Clone Hero (and others) exist, they’re obviously not as big as Fortnite but big enough. Also the Gibson thing you’re referring to is from CRKD, who started putting out new guitars over the summer, plus the already mentioned PDP Riffmaster. So it seems there’s at least enough demand out there that 2 companies started making new controllers for these games.
Lesser known, but I cannot recommend enough going back and exploring the worlds of ZZT (and by extension, MegaZeux) as an early, amateur game engine. The projects are raw but endearing and an absolutely wonderful time capsule that still has a niche but dedicated following.
Some day when I have the time, I’d like to make an extended engine similar to this. Something with a simple scripting language, extreme flexibility in character and color sets. Ability to run and host your own game worlds over SSH or something similar. Just like a real spit in the face for triple A and going the complete opposite direction of minimal but super accessible.
somehow missed zzt entirely, never played it, seen some random screenshots back in the day and thought it was some kind of weird nethack -clone with occasional ascii graphics. But also the only few screenshots I recall looked like nethack, with ascii smiley -character instead lf @ as user avatar.
So… it’s some kind of game engine which you can script to make any kind of game, kinda?
It’s unfortunately a lot more limited than you may expect, it’s designed around very limited ideas, but that said it’s still incredibly flexible and seeing how people have designed complex games around those limitations is half the fun.
MegaZeux is a fan extension of it (skipping over SuperZZT) that expands it further and breaks a lot of those limitations, but still has certain odd assumptions about gameplay very much from its era.
It’s the first game released by the developer on the engine which is intended to show off a bunch of the ideas they had. It has a surprise ending that leads into a very bizarre Zeux 3 (which I haven’t beat yet). Zeux 1 was on ZZT but I think was remade for the engine at some point.
Spend an afternoon poking around the site and just trying a few games in your browser, see what it’s about! Then check out the help files and look at the scripting. The biggest downside for me is that if/then statements can ONLY EVER lead to jumps. You can’t process simple logic without jumping to a label to do so …
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Funny he thinks that, I think that Tim Sweeny should stfu.
Some of us want quality over mass produced crap stolen from others.
Valve revolutionized Linux gaming; Tim categorically rejects it.
Valve banned shitcoins and blockchain scams; Tim welcomed them with open arms.
Valve enforces honesty regarding AI slop; Tim wants to literally deceive people.
All that on top of what they did with third-party exclusives.
He’s like that annoying kid who didn’t get invited to a birthday party and vowed to always do the opposite of what the popular kid does. Petulant fucking overgrown child.
would’ve been nice if they banned gambling, too, but that’s part of their business model unfortunately.
LordGabn has to buy Aston Martin’s so how.
I hear people say this sometimes, but I don’t know what they mean. Is there part of Valve’s system that has a gambling mechanic I’ve just never engaged with?
Or is it one of their games that has gambling?
Because I’ve been using it for years as basically my sole gaming interface and haven’t seen any gambling.
TF2 was the original gacha game.
Mainly Team Fortress 2 and Counter Strike GO/2, cuz both of them have cosmetics with rarities obtained via what effectively amounts to lootboxes. In one sense they also have an out-of-game economy around these things where these items are traded for actual money
All their big multiplayer games have lootboxes and stuff like that.
Loot boxes in Counter-Strike
There is a massive secondary market for in-game items (primarily CS skins) that Valve refuses to combat or even officially acknowledge. Some of it is legitimate, some of it is literal lottery for children. And since every transaction takes place on Steam, they get a cut of that.
The short version is that an enormous, multibillion dollar gambling industry has been built around Valve’s item marketplace, and in particular around CS:GO skins. If that sounds completely insane and stupid, I’m with you, but it exists. Valve takes their typical cut off of all of these trades, and thus derives massive profits from it.
Here’s the long version: https://peertube.gravitywell.xyz/videos/watch/a8e6d20c-3003-4b14-b9c4-cb6a25b238e7?isPeertubeContent=1
Huh. I didn’t know this was a feature Steam had. Weird!
At least the shit is all cosmetic not like EA sports games with their UT packs I guess. Low bar.
It might be cosmetic, but it can be sold, which fuels the addiction mechanic. EA is bad, too, but this whataboutism.
I think difference is EA is more a game company so people see a game they like then judge the monetization because its a full priced game that turns out to have f2p monetization.
But, Valve is more judged for its experience as a launcher and less for its games. So with the launcher itself being the draw things like Valve game lootboxes can be something people are completely unexposed to as they play other games.
But, EA is still at a stage where the products that receive the most visibility are their games, and the launcher and services side so underwhelming it isn’t a selling point.
Its like Costco versus a company known for its pizza. Costco is a warehouse store people love going to that happens to sell pizza, but is judged on multiple things that draw them there over other stores as opposed to pizza. A pizza company is just known primarily for its pizza so judged on the quality of their pizza.
The launcher?! This bloatware is the second worst thing about Valve’s services right after the gamble mechanics.
Gambling mechanic is as impactful to me as Costco selling alcohol and junk food. I don’t play those games, so only reason I’m even aware of it is because of people bringing it up. Those who seek it out can get it those who come for other things can avoid it.
And I like the steam launcher when it comes to linux compatibility, steam workshop, reviews, categorizing my games, note function, and gamepad support. I absolutely would not want to go back to the old days of CDs for games. Too many to manage and keep track of. And I like my Steam Deck for introducing me to Linux gaming, and being one of the few launchers that actually has Linux support and doesn’t need to rely on third party work arounds.
Those who don’t value that can buy from Epic or other launchers the way some people don’t see the difference buying from Costco vs Walmart and see membership fees as a waste of money. Or go over to consoles to be free of launchers entirely.
I’d say the only thing that bothers me about Steam is that you can’t completely ignore updates for games, so have to go into offline mode or save a copy then update then replace the directory or use steam console to retrieve the old version if you accidentally updated. That’s been my only gripe as a Steam user for games like Skyrim where I don’t want updates.
I don’t want to discredit Steam’s features like compatibility layers, but the software itself is a mess. It is an unnessecary RAM-heavy chromium instance, to be fair, just like most other launchers. I replaced it with Playnite which is streamlined, responsive and more feature rich for managing a library (Steam still needs to be installed of course because they don’t offer offline installer like GOG). And I’d argue that console user saren’t free of launcher, they are locked into a very specific one.
But as someone who’s neither been to Costco nor Walmart, what is the difference?
definitely keep doing it then. Sweeney is consistently on the wrong side.
Bingo! Valve is one hell of a monopoly, but they don’t totally fuck their customers. Sweeney has to answer to his shareholders. Those are the real customers; not you and me.
which is like 40% tencent.
Not 10%? I thought tencents thing was they just have a 10% share in an absurd amount of stuff
Both Valve and Epic are private companies and thus have a bit more of a say over what they do than public companies would. Sweeney actually just answers to himself, and I mean that pejoratively, otherwise he would have invested in EGS more to compete with Steam and focused more on Unreal Engine’s near-monopoly in the AAA space.
Instead, he focused on “owning” the metaverse, and courting crypto. If I were a shareholder, I would say he wasn’t acting in my best interests.
And if it’s as he says, and eventually all games get labeled that way, what’s his problem with that? Man just doesn’t want to compete.
I think a lot of people might clutch their proverbial pearls when they find out that AI has been involved with game development for years now.
Every person in every industry in a rush to replace the work of creative people with output from machine learning models can fuck right off.
Every consumer who is content with products made by such people can also fuck right off.
Ok. You want a cookie?
No, I want worker protections, regulatory enforcement, and broad public distrust of the exploitative owner class who are using AI to extract more wealth while destroying the environment we all live in.
Patronizing “AI” systems is collaboration with the worst garbage of the human race, the robber barons who are comfortable killing people for quarterly profits.
People like Peter Theil, Elon Musk and Sam Altman.
Nothing epic about the guy or his company.
Epic fail.
Tbf AI tag should be about AI-generated assets. Cause there is no problem in keeping code quality while using AI, and that’s what the whole dev industry do now.
The killer app is language processing and if a localization contractor isn’t using an LLM to quickly check for style errors and inconsistencies, they’re just making it hard for them for no good reason.
Hahahahahahahaha
This opinion is contradicted by basically everyone who has attempted to use models to generate useful code which must interface with existing codebases. There are always quality issues, it must always be reviewed for functional errors, it rarely interoperates with existing code correctly, and it might just delete your production database no matter how careful you try to be.
I feel like I get where he’s coming from, but I can see the revulsion.
I picture someone asking their AI to write a rules engine for a gamemode and getting masses of duplicative, horrific code; but in my own work, my company has encouraged an assistive tool, and once it has an idea of what I’m trying to do, it will offer autocomplete options that are pretty spot on.
Still, I very much agree it’s hard to sort the difference and in untrained hands can definitely lead to unmaintainable code slop. Everything needs to get reviewed by knowledgeable human eyes before running.
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I’m sorry, what exactly do you think this conversation is about if not using AI for code generation?
I’m sorry, too
So don’t accept code that is shit. Have decent PR process. Accountability is still on human.
If this is necessary then there is, in point of fact, a “problem in keeping code quality while using AI”.
This is necessary when working with 100% human code too.
OK, sure, but again the claim was:
Whether or not human-written code also requires review is outside the context of this discussion, and entirely irrelevant.
A decent review process is always necessary, LLMs or not.
OK, sure, but again the claim was:
Whether or not human-written code also requires review is outside the context of this discussion, and entirely irrelevant.
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The people lazy enough to have ai generate their code aren’t going to do that. You’re acting like games didn’t already have bugs before we invented a mostly wrong shortcut that kinda looks just good enough to fake being useful.
No, the issue with “AI” is thinking that it’s able to make anything production ready, be it art, code or dialog.
I do believe that LLMs have lots of great applications in a game pipeline, things like placeholders and copilot for small snippets work great, but if you think that anything that an LLM produces is production ready and you don’t need a professional to look at it and redo it (because that’s usually easier than fixing the mistakes) you’re simply out of touch with reality.
Are you even reading what I say? You are supposed to have a professional approving generated stuff.
But it’s still AI-generated, it doesn’t become less AI-generated because a human that knows shit about the subject approved it.
This is what you said:
At no point did you mention someone approving it.
Also, you should read what I said, I said most large stuff generated by AI needs to be completely redone. You can generate a small function or maybe a small piece of an image, if you have a professional validating that small chunk, but if you think you can generate an entire program or image with LLMs you’re delusional.
https://vger.to/piefed.ca/comment/2422544 mentioned here.
Dude are you a software dev? Did you hear about, like, tickets? You are supposed to split bigger task into smaller tickets at a project approval phase.
LLM agents are completely capable of taking well-documented tickets and generating some semblance of code that you shape with a few upcoming prompts, criticising code style & issues until they are all fixed.
I’m not theoretical, this is how it’s done today. MCPs into JIRA and Figma and UI tickets just get about 90% done in a single prompt. Harder stuff is done in “invesrigate and write .md how to solve” & “this is why that won’t work, do this instead” to like 70% ready.
Sorry, I won’t go through your post history to reply to a comment, be clearer on the stuff you write.
I’m a software engineer, and if that’s how you code you’re either wasting time or producing garbage code, which might be acceptable wherever you work, but I guarantee you that you would not pass code reviews where I do. I do use copilot, and it’s good at suggesting small snippets, maybe an if, maybe a function header, but even then 60% of the time I need to change what it suggested. Reviewing code is harder than writing it yourself, even if I could trust that the LLM would do exactly what I asked (which I can’t, not by a long shot) it would maybe be opened to bugs or special cases that I would have to read the code, understand what it tried to do, figure out edge cases on that solution and see if it handled them. In short, it would take me much longer to do stuff via LLMs than writing them myself, because writing code is the easy part of programming, thinking on the solution and it’s limitations and edge cases is the hard part, and LLMs can’t understand that. The moment you describe your solution in sufficient detail that an LLM can possibly generate the right code, you’ve essentially written the code yourself just in a more complicated and ambiguous format, this is what most non technical managers fail to understand, code is just structured English, we’re already writing something better than prompts to an LLM.
This is literally in this thread.
Again, your solution should be already thought out and described in tickets and approved tech plan. If it’s not, SDLC problem.
And it’s not true that agents can’t help with edge cases, they can. If you know which points to look at, you task to analyze the specific interaction and watch which parts of the code would be mentioned.
I do write way less amount of symbols to LLM than I would when I write code. Those symbols don’t have to be structured and they can even have typos, so I can focus my brain activity on things that actually matter.
Plus, copilot is shit.
I rate your post as a skill issue.
It’s not in the thread line I’m replying to, to get to that I would have had to read another reply, and all of the replies to that to spot yours.
If the work you do can be fully specified in a Jira ticket, you’re a code monkey and not a software engineer, of course you can use LLMs to do your job since you can be replaced by an LLM.
You’re missing my point entirely, it’s not that it can’t help with, it’s that the solution it writes will not take them into account unless you tell it to, and to explain every edge case in enough details to be unambiguous about all of them is essentially the same as writing code directly. Not to mention that you can’t possibly know all of the edge cases of the solution it will write without seeing it, so you can’t directly tell it to watch for edge cases without knowing what code it will write.
Maybe, but then you have to review everything it wrote so you waste more time. Give me one concrete example of something that you can prompt an LLM to give you code that is advanced enough to be worth it (i.e. writing the prompt and reviewing the code it wrote would be faster than writing the code myself) and not generic enough that I would be able to find the answer in stack overflow.
If you don’t structure them the LLM might misinterpret what you meant. Structure in a language is required to make things unambiguous, this reminds me of the stupid joke of “go to the store and bring 1L of milk, if they have eggs bring 6” and the programmer coming back with 6L of milk because they had eggs. Of course that’s a stupid example, but anything complex enough to be worth using an LLM would be hard to describe unambiguously and covering all edge cases in normal human speak.
Typos are very easy to correct, most editors will highlight them for you, and some can even autocorrect them but more likely you avoid most of them by using tab completion anyways. I don’t waste any brain activity on that, I’m thinking on the solution and structuring it in an unambiguous way, that is what writing code is, it’s not some cryptic art of writing the proper runes to make the machine do your will like you seem to be implying, it’s just structured thought.
Might be, wouldn’t know any other as that’s the one I have available to use, but sincerely I doubt others are that much better to make a difference.
Yup, I have absolutely no skill in using LLMs, nor will I waste my time with it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a neat tool for auto completing small snippets like we used to do with an actual snippet library a couple of years ago, it is also a decent tool to navigate unknown code bases asking it where certain parts are or how to achieve something in the. I would say that 60% of the time it gives you some good pointers, but 90% of the time most of the code it writes is wrong, but at least it points you in the right direction of where to start investigating.
I don’t expect you to understand this since from what I’m reading here you probably never worked on anything big enough, but a software engineer job is not to write code, that’s just a side-effect, our job is to solve problems, so either you’re trying to get the LLM to solve the problem for you, or wasting lots of time explaining your solution in English, reading the generated code, understanding it, analyzing it, fixing any issues and testing it, possibly multiple times instead of explaining your solution once in code and testing it.
I don’t know how long it’s been since I even bothered claiming the free game of the week. Like a year.
I’d rather buy a game on Steam than get it for free from Epic. Seriously.
I claimed the first few games and their launcher was shit. Now, to be fair, Steam wasn’t exactly a pinnacle of achievement when it first came out, either, but it’s been refined and honed to a razor. Epic is just “let’s throw shit at the wall and see what happens”, with no coherent strategy or marketing beyond “we’re not Steam!”. Their client, as I understand it, is still shit, and their CEO is a jackass. Haven’t had it installed in years now. Meanwhile, I have a backlog on Steam of like 1000 games.
Why would I ever use Epic? It has no value.
And yes, that goes for games sold on Steam with the “have to use Origin” bullshit, too. I’m not launching Steam to then launch Origin. This is not Inception. Let me play my damn game and stay out of it. Ya know?
And i bet you don’t even touch the free game you claimed because Epic launcher take forever to launch.
Nobody wants to give their computer AIDS for a free game.
I’ve never even installed the Epic Lawnchair. I just use Heroic, which works very well.
My Steam backlog is 600+ games deep so I don’t have to swim in that Epic shit. Sweeney can suck a nut.
I got a few epic games to be claimed on epic store. I just don’t. I don’t have an account and I also do not have a will to make one. Nothing of value is there anyway.
Man… the future is going to be BLEAK.
Are you kidding? I might actually stop buying new games and make it through my backlog now! This is great!
I like how he’s basically admitting that it’s a negative that would hurt the game sales. Because consumers don’t want it.
Yep all those people not liking the idea of AI labels telling on themselves. For how much the AI bros talk up AI they are incredibly skittish about having to show what products were created using it. If it is so awesome why the fear?
Like an artist who traces their drawings, but doesn’t want to disclose it so more people will assume they free handed it.
Dipshit
I think I just understood why UE5 sucks that much…
You are the first person I have ever heard say UE5 sucks. Why?
I really am? (no sarcasm here, honest surprise)
I thought it’s widespread knowledge that the “upgrade” to UE5 mainly brought a lot of performance loss compared to UE4 while having a signature blurry (or whatever) style which actually worsens the perceived quality.
For example expedition 33, while it’s style is awesome, it’s performance is absolutely not. It should run flawless on ps5 and on superior pcs but still doesn’t and the fps range is not in line with the hardware capabilities.
I hate to be the one to say it but an ambitious game made by a small team is a shit game to use as an example. They did not have the budget to optimize and the game is full of small technical flaws. Who ever told you that UE4 is better than UE5 is wrong, even without Lumen or Nanite. Also most games in UE4 only used 2k textures and in UE5 8k textures are used. The assets are heavier in general.
I seem to have struck a nerve there, apologies.
I don’t think it’s a shit example. It’s the latest I experienced. It’s a good game but hampered technically. Nobody needs to tell me, I’ve been gaming since before dos and grew up with it; I’ve also been working in it for a few decades.
Look; you could just have a bigger or more gpus with more ram in a pc but if the end result does not significantly look better the question is for what all the effort is.
And that’s what happened with UE5.
Yes, maybe in a few years it might look different but it’s also been some time and hasn’t really been worth any of the performance impact.
And - as said - I see quality impact in UE5 games which I personally can not comprehend in an supposed upgrade.
However, feel free to disagree.
Maybe it’s my background in datacenters: of course you can always meet demand with more raw power but it’s a losing fight and the intelligent progress is to optimize and use resources in a clever way.
While UE5 is a one size fits all for game dev, it does not mean all games have to try to have the highest quality graphics possible. CO took that route. You can do whatever you want and optimize as much as you can. You are correct, studios are just going ham on the capabilities and not caring about the hardware requirements. Having a min requirements of a 12th Gen intel, 32GB RAM and 3060 is fucked up. And you need 64GB of RAM for good performance. My biggest gripe on the UE4 vs 5 opinion is that you can still make a low-fi game that runs at 200fps. It’s a design choice not an engine choice.
If Tim has no haters I’m dead
Thank God the consumer can ignore it if they wish.
Epic Games had glory days?
Unreal Tournament 2004 was a spectacular arena shooter back in the day before Battle Royale and MOBAs completely took over. Aged like fine wine too.
Yeah, I’m old.
An it included linux native binaries! on the disk! It was absolutely fantastic, i played a lot in invasion servers for years and years.
Some people don’t like to hear it, but Fortnite is basically the new Unreal Tournament… in the same way it’s the new Rockband. For the latter, it’s easy: Epic acquired Rockband and Guitar Hero creator Harmonix, and Fortnite Festival is just the latest version of that code, only you can’t use instrument controllers with it, only gamepads (or, I suppose, keyboards or touch screens). So what Fortnite really is, it’s a free-to-play showcase of the Unreal Engine. It’s meant to show off what it can do and anyone can pick it up and play for free. Of course, it doesn’t have all the features of Unreal Tournament. It’s pretty much just battle royale with base building. But it’s the newest version of the same engine and it’s a shooter. Not the same thing… but your skills with older UT definitely translate. My nephew got me to play it. I’d never played it before, and he had spent money on the skins and the extra stuff, so he would go around making big purple explosions and he’d attract attention. Me, I was blown away by the detail, but I found the movement just as fluid as I remembered. Once I got the hang of weapons and their grades, I was scouting out the best pistols and SMGs I could find, and shadowing his character, and when he got into fights, I’d circle around, flank his enemies, and we’d win every fight. We won our first match and I don’t think we’ve lost a match. If we did, we finished in the top 5-10%. We have an unconventional playstyle, and it’s really all me. He plays like most Fortnite players, and they engage him as such. I play like a UT player… or, more accurately, I play it like a Deus Ex player (which was based on the same UE1 that UT99 was). I pick my shots and I shoot to kill. My nephew doesn’t think I’m playing the game right, but he’s having fun and he likes winning.
That said, I don’t love the game. I keep it on my Xbox, but I only play with him (or, I suppose, I’d be open to playing with anyone who asked). Even solo (I did that once on my iPhone when Fortnite came back to iOS this year or last) I still do alright for myself. Rarely take the top spot though. I need a decoy. But if there are 100 players, there’s no shame in being in the last 5 of them.
https://pdpguitar.com/
Not 100% on drum compatibility as I have no interest in Festival, but it not only supports guitar controllers, but PDP even made new models for it.
RIP Rock Band, fuck Epic.
Oh, so you have to buy new ones? Yeah, no. I have Xbox 360 and Xbox One (RB3 and RB4 era) instruments and neither generation work. I’m not buying a new guitar for Fortnite. That’s crazy.
I heard there’s a new guitar controller out (Gibson?), some like 20th anniversary thing? And I’m wondering who this is for. These games are dead.
RB4 guitars should work.
https://www.ign.com/articles/fortnite-festival-finally-adds-support-for-rock-band-4-and-pdp-riffmaster-guitar-controllers
YARG and Clone Hero (and others) exist, they’re obviously not as big as Fortnite but big enough. Also the Gibson thing you’re referring to is from CRKD, who started putting out new guitars over the summer, plus the already mentioned PDP Riffmaster. So it seems there’s at least enough demand out there that 2 companies started making new controllers for these games.
ut99 > 2k4! But it is a close call, admittedly.
But also, epic released some absolute bangers in the 90’s, though admittedly as a publisher. eg. Castle of the Winds, One Must Fall 2097.
Lesser known, but I cannot recommend enough going back and exploring the worlds of ZZT (and by extension, MegaZeux) as an early, amateur game engine. The projects are raw but endearing and an absolutely wonderful time capsule that still has a niche but dedicated following.
https://museumofzzt.com/
https://www.digitalmzx.com/
Some day when I have the time, I’d like to make an extended engine similar to this. Something with a simple scripting language, extreme flexibility in character and color sets. Ability to run and host your own game worlds over SSH or something similar. Just like a real spit in the face for triple A and going the complete opposite direction of minimal but super accessible.
FuckyeahZZT!!!
So good.
somehow missed zzt entirely, never played it, seen some random screenshots back in the day and thought it was some kind of weird nethack -clone with occasional ascii graphics. But also the only few screenshots I recall looked like nethack, with ascii smiley -character instead lf @ as user avatar.
So… it’s some kind of game engine which you can script to make any kind of game, kinda?
That’s it exactly.
It’s unfortunately a lot more limited than you may expect, it’s designed around very limited ideas, but that said it’s still incredibly flexible and seeing how people have designed complex games around those limitations is half the fun.
MegaZeux is a fan extension of it (skipping over SuperZZT) that expands it further and breaks a lot of those limitations, but still has certain odd assumptions about gameplay very much from its era.
You can actually play right in browser, try Zeux 2: Caverns of Zeux, https://www.digitalmzx.com/show.php?id=182
It’s the first game released by the developer on the engine which is intended to show off a bunch of the ideas they had. It has a surprise ending that leads into a very bizarre Zeux 3 (which I haven’t beat yet). Zeux 1 was on ZZT but I think was remade for the engine at some point.
Spend an afternoon poking around the site and just trying a few games in your browser, see what it’s about! Then check out the help files and look at the scripting. The biggest downside for me is that if/then statements can ONLY EVER lead to jumps. You can’t process simple logic without jumping to a label to do so …
that does sound quite cool. I’ll have to check this out, feels like something I would have really enjoyed as a kid.
Thanks!
I remember one must fall 2097!
First game I ever bought.
Mailed a freaking cheque internationally, and got a box of 3.5" floppy disks back about 6 weeks later.
Wild times.
I only ever had the Shareware version with a few fighters, but played it so much.
I’m gonna get the freeware version just for the nostalgia. I used to beat the piss out of my little brother in this game.
only played the shareware, until I found out that the full game was eventually released as freeware.
Then years after I went to game store and bought One Must Fall: Battlegrounds on release day… mistakes were made.
That was fun!
Objectively yes. From the 90s to the early ‘10s.
Unreal 1 was a milestone, and Unreal Engine always has been very popular, now more than ever.
Gears of War was huge.
Unreal Tournament was pretty big for several iterations.
Unreal engine is STILL used by half the video game industry.
Epic Megagames certainly did.
Jill of.the Jungle was fun