But on closed source drivers, right?

There are space games with procedural large scale galaxies to the point that the entire playerbase can only ever hope to see ~15% of the systems, but that’s why I put the >50% qualifier in there. That’s TOO big. Anyone can generate an effectively infinite procedural world, I want a large world.

When I had originally conceived of this, it was in the context of a pokemon MMO. You would have your home town, and as a trainer, or researcher, or rocket member, etc, you’d travel at a real-time pace akin to the show.

Alternative IP that it could work with are dragonball (imagine the playerbase on a months long search to find/fight over the dragonballs so they could awaken the dragon and make a wish to the devs), or Avatar (each player would have a chance to spawn in as a random bender. One player at any given time is the Avatar. Events happen to strengthen some benders and weaken others. Players make war and peace at will).

There would obviously be challenges in running these types of experiences, but currently it feels like the cost of standing up an MMO is so much that no one ever does anything interesting. Instead they just copy WoW.

I don’t consider NMS to be an MMO. If everyone went to the same location, at best, you’d most likely only see a handful of players you’re instanced with (up to 32 from what a cursory search gives me). That’s kinda the sad state of what passes for an MMO these days, but I don’t accept it. That’s not even a full raid group in WoW.

But yeah, you could squint and say that that otherwise effectively produces the experience I’m asking for. I am looking forward to LNF for sure.

I don’t think that means it didn’t work, I think that just means it’s not for everyone. I’m a firm believer that, “given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game”. Small indie games take firm stances on their gameplay all the time, not every game is for everyone, and that’s ok, that’s how you get unique and interesting gameplay experiences. But that’s easy for and indie game to do because making an indie game is cheap.

MMOs have the unfortunate reality that they’re architecturally complex, and expensive to operate, and thus need to appeal to as wide of an audience as possible to justify their existence to investors. They don’t have the luxury of making the experience they want, which is why they all end up just copying WoW’s enshittified gameplay, but with less polish.

My hope is that this indie revolution we’re in expands to “large scale” multiplayer games. Not so massive that it’s prohibitively expensive to run, but not so small that it’s a ghost town. I think that’s when we’ll start to see interesting MMO experiences again.

WoW is objectively huge, but they made it feel tiny by putting fast travel options everywhere. I would guess that any two points in the world are no more than 5m from each other if routed perfectly.

I want there to exist one MMO where you “live” in a city, and traveling to another city is actually so inconvenient that you only do it if you have to. Not because I want to make the trek, but because I want there to be a world just large enough that any one person has usually seen only ~1%, but the playerbase in entirety has seen >50%. I don’t know if any such game exists.

Hah, I had thought, well it’s not quite reincarnation, because you don’t come back as something new, you come back as yourself with the same memories. But I’m just noticing that it does seem like “the Big Problem” is very similar to what [my rudimentary understanding of] the Buddhist quest for transcendence is.

People or LLMs?

Hold up, what did I read into it? I directly quoted you and asked for clarification on whether you currently believe that is the state of AI, or whether you’re saying that’s what automation used to be.

If you’re saying that’s what automation used to be, then we agree. But if you believe that modern AI can only do the “tedious bullshit no one wants to do”, that’s literally not the case.

Sora 2 is generating realistic video of anything you want given just a text prompt, rivaling the best VFX artists.

Hollywood is currently clamoring to “work with” AI celebrities who don’t exist, with a synthetic voice, singing songs no one composed with lyrics generated by an LLM. Why give a cut to a pop artist or band if you can synthesize it from nothing?

The education system has been completely upturned because every assignment can be completed by an AI, and there’s no way for the teacher to detect it. And it’s having a measurably damaging effect on students’ intellect.

A popular quote floating around right now is, “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”

And right now I literally can’t know if someone is running an AI with the prompt: “respond to this comment as though you are an out of touch older American who still thinks the capabilities of generative AI are limited to simple automation of tedious tasks no one wants to do anyway.” And you don’t know if I’m an AI with the prompt, “respond to this comment like a condescending tech literate young adult who is afraid of the impact that generative AI owned and funded by an oligarchy is going to have on every aspect of their future.”

I honestly feel stupid even bothering to type any of this out. I’m surely being had.

And it’s worth noting that you can’t automate the interesting parts of a job, as those are creative. All you can tackle is the rote, the tedious, the structured bullshit that no one wants to do in the first place.

Are you saying that this used to be the case and acknowledging that it’s no longer true with modern AI? Because it’s demonstrably not true for modern AI and is the entire reason people are fearful.

Honestly, this post is so far out of the loop, part of me is wondering if it’s AI generated.

Rainworld

…but when you start the game, you are merely trying to survive and explore a living ecology full of hostile creatures. The game doesn’t care if you understand any of the lore, it doesn’t care if you “finish” the game, it’s just there to be experienced.

If coding is the means to an end they want, they will learn it.

I started learning how to program because I wanted to mod Halo 20y ago. Gaming is often a motivator. I had a co-worker who started in the 80s, whose only option to play games on his C64 was to type up a bunch of BASIC from a magazine. He had to take care not to make any typos, then play the game, and then didn’t have any persistent tape to save it to, so he just lost it all on a reboot. Turns out, if you’re “forced” to type code in all the time, you start to figure out which bits do what, and you start changing it to behave how you want.

“Hacking” could probably work as a motivator, though with great power comes great responsibility.

But yeah, a kid won’t be interested in programming unless they see it as their only option to do what they want to do. PICO8 might be a good entry. Or something like Minecraft modding.

Reddit also has a bunch of similar communities with overlapping topics. That’s not a Lemmy thing.

I prefer the Fediverse to grow organically. If that means everyone reads this thread and suddenly unanimously decides that we need to change how we organize topics across instances, so be it. But I don’t think that’ll happen, and that’s fine too.

If it can’t survive organically, then it can’t survive.

And you can build your own PC and peripherals, yet every aspect of the gaming industry is funded and driven by corporations. Always has been, and Linux gaming is no exception.

I specifically acknowledged the FOSS efforts to eliminate depenence on valve, I think it’s great, but even Bazzite uses the SteamDeck UI. Do you know if there’s a FOSS deck UI replacement that unifies all storefronts/repos, and works as smoothly? I want that to exist.

Steam is just objectively the smoothest linux gaming experience for the largest number of people right now. It’d be awesome if that wasn’t the case, but for now it is.

That is literally the opposite of Musk’s goal.

I’ll be the first to say I don’t like Linux gaming’s dependence on valve. I wish steam wasn’t the best experience, and I applaud all the effort that the FOSS community puts in to keep them honest.

But for the “gambling” monetization in particular, this is really a “don’t hate the player, hate the game” situation. It’s on people/govts to regulate this. If Valve said tomorrow, “you’re right, we’re not going to monetize gambling anymore because we think it is unethical”, they would just lose to a competitor who is less ethical.

It’s the same as saying, “if you’re rich and are pro higher taxes, why don’t you just choose to pay more? Nothing is stopping you.” Because that’s not going to fix anything, it’s just a losing strategy. What you need is a system where everyone is required by law to behave in a way that benefits the society.

To that end, Valve’s most ethical move would be to lobby the govt to ban unethical monetization. I know they’re making bank, but whether they’re making enough to out-lobby all the others who are also doing this, I don’t know…also we all know the US is not exactly positioned for effective FTC policies right now…

Guaranteed, he’s going to count the Console Wars in his list of wars he’s ended.

I replayed through Red Alert 2 and Yuri’s Revenge recently. The live action cutscenes are beautifully campy. Top notch. In the Soviet campaign, you steal the Allied time machine and use it to go back to stop Yuri; but you quickly learn that “our Soviet power supply is too efficient, and it sent us back 65 million years!” You then spend a minute defending against an onslaught of T-Rexes before it recharges to send you to the correct time period. A whole “level” for that one-off joke! They don’t make em like they used to…

These comments are severely overestimating the level of autonomy players are given in this game. It’s just a branching story, where the branches one player is presented with are dependent on the branch another player chose. I imagine if only a single person plays this game, it will just make stuff up to make it seem like there are other players affecting the world.

Also, also the cynicism on Lemmy is a stale meta at this point. Be the change you wanna see or stfu.

Brings me back to the days of modding Custom Edition. Good times…

I don’t know the state of it these days, but there was a shim layer for android called Magisk that had a plugin that would allow you to spoof permissions to apps. So the app thinks it has access to your location and contacts, but what they actually have is a random GPS coord and an empty list.

I want this to be how permissions control works, but apple and google have no incentive to give it to us.