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Wordle 883 4/6*

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This is hilarious!

[Best Commercial Game]

It's just always made sense to me to say the AGS Awards are open to all AGS games, but commercial games should only be represented by a "Best Commercial Game" category, where commercial games can exclusively compete against each other. Most people might disagree, which is fine, but I've yet to hear an compelling argument against doing this (though I realize the irony of the fact that I may not have presented a compelling argument for doing this either!), beyond it not being a popular opinion

As I mentioned, the argument would be that there wouldn't be enough commercial games nominated for such an award to make it viable as its own category. And then that's essentially excluding commercial games from being recognised by AGS.

I don't think LimpingFish is suggesting excluding commercial games from the awards, when this discussion came up in previous years, the suggestion was usually having them only applicable for a specific "Best Commercial Game" award. This wasn't usually feasible, since there weren't enough commercial games released in a single year, but I get the feeling that's still true today.

Radiant reminded me that I have a key available for his cool game Heroine's Quest: The Herald of Ragnarok on GOG.

Hope you enjoy it, whoever redeems it! 

It grinds my gears when people in public transport in rush hour(trams, trains, subways) slowly hobble their way forward and just stand around in the middle of the isle rather than just go forward, take a seat if there is one, or else try to stand to the side so the other people can.

Seriously, the rush hour tube is NOT the place to stand around lazing about and blocking the way for stressed-out people who just want to get away from the sweaty crowd and get on with their way. And no, the majority of these sloths are NOT frail elderly, pregnant, or handicapped, but perfectly able-bodied young people who inexplicably think that it's fun roleplaying as a zombie where it's the most inconvenient.

Your comment reminded me of lots of nagivation based gears to grind, one of which was what you described, but everywhere: People suddenly deciding to hold up other people's movement in the most inconvenient places: suddenly stopping in the middle of gates or doorways, for example, or standing in your way outside elevators while you're in them.

As an everywhere walker in a place that isn't kind to walkers, I have a whole host of other ground gears too, the one that bugs me most often is while I'm running, especially along an intersection (or somewhere a vehicle can come perpendicular to me), and seeing me going across their path already, instead of turning behind me, the motorbike or bicycle (or small car) speeds up so that it can try to make the gap in front of me instead.

Been getting 2 more often recently, which is interesting, because I always use the same starting word

Wordle 826 2/6*

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My aching old knees!

Maybe the subject of the meme is just giving you their point of view?

It shone
Pale as bone
As I stood there alone
And I thought to myself how the moon
That night
Cast its light
On my heart's true delight
And the reef where her body was strewn.

Not an entry, obviously

I thought the best movie monster was within us all along?

Bad ones do...

A bad artist using shortcuts is never going to surpass a good artist using shortcuts. In fact, they're probably not even going to surpass a good artist not using shortcuts.

But you can't argue both points; either AI art is good enough to provide a useful product (proto-art that a human can then expand upon, or use in creating a finished piece of art), or AI art is garbage that nobody in their right mind would try to pass off as acceptable. If the AI is making bad art, why would an artist want to use that as a base to work from? On the other hand, if AI will eventually become "better", why limit it, why not let it take over content generation completely?

I don't think my point is contradictory- something being usable as a base or source or inspiration is different from something being usable as is. A good artist can use it to save time in their process of making original art, a bad artist can use it as is, and be called out for having horrible art (or find a use case where quality doesn't matter).
 

There's no doubt, that in some form, AI could be used effectively as another tool in making artwork (much like Photoshop), whether with advanced compositing, background removal, etc*. What I object to is the concept of "creative" AI; generating content alone, not with creativity or insight, but by algorithmic necromancy. Quality is irrelevant.

You put it in quotes, so you understand already, but it is important to hammer this point in- there is no such thing as "creative" AI. The way AI has been trained is by looking at thousands of images so that when you give it a fill in the blanks art question, it fills in the blank with the answer that has the highest score according to its algorithm. If we are talking about a potential future where AI is making art all on its own and it is something purely creative...we're nowhere near there yet.

As I said in my earlier post, that indeed is the end result sought by those at the top of the food chain. Sensible people like you and me might see it as folly, but that's where we're heading.

In the situations where such things are in focus, it doesn't matter what the people at the top of the food chain want. If they try to implement a process for their products purely using AI, their quality will suffer, and people will move to other products. If they find a niche where the actual quality doesn't matter as much and people get that, then...ok. It still won't take away from people who actually put in effort into their art. The example you linked above was AI generated children's books, and children not having that good a grasp of quality, it sounds like it would be an exploitable niche, except even then, the guy has only earned $100, and I'm pretty sure he's not going to eclipse any actually skilled writers.

Where did this idea come from that, all of a sudden, artists/musicians/writers/etc need some sort of crutch or short-cut to be creative? We have hundreds of years of creativity that worked just fine without AI. Artists learned their art through practice, study, and discipline. Yes, the influence of existing art and the world around us will shape and inspire an artist, as it always has, but that art will be embraced on a critical, human level, not ingested as an algorithm. AI apologists like to talk about "opening up art to the masses", as though lack of actual talent was just a single pebble to be avoided on the road to creating (commercial of otherwise) art. It's a lie. It's not gatekeeping that stops you from being an artist...it's the fact that you're not a fucking artist! That doesn't mean that you can't eventually become one, if you have a small grain of talent that can be honed and polished through hard work. But there's no magic bullet.

AI is a way for talentless people to appear otherwise, and unscrupulous people to make easy money. Read the opening to that article I linked above. The man featured is not a writer, and has no discernible talent in that arena. AI enabled him to overcome this, by generating a hollow, ersatz product which he used to fulfill his "dream" of becoming a "published" author. Will AI write his next book too? It would be tragic, if it wasn't so damaging to actual artists.

Artists and creatives don't "need" a shortcut, but if a company needs some piece of media, and one person can provide a good quality product without AI in a week, and another person can provide an acceptable level of quality in 3 days that used AI as a base, the company would probably go for the AI one. And sure, yeah, "Capitalism sucks" and all of that. But AI is just a tool, it's not a boogeyman that's going to destroy creatives. Even using the example of the article you linked, purely AI-created works are pretty much error-riddled trash. Nobody is going to be replaced by someone purely using AI and nothing else.

I kind of echo Cat's feelings on the matter here.

In terms of AI being trained on copyrighted material, it does seem immoral, and hopefully there can be laws put in place that prohibit that (and I think there are now, sort of? i.e. some country implemented that you can't copyright anything made using AI).

But in terms of creatives complaining that AI will eliminate them, I really don't see that happening at all. have you seen those AI created pieces of art/writing? They're very obvious and not really useful as is. The most they can be used for is a jumping off point or base to make something. If companies are rushing to fire their creatives and replace them with AI, they're going to be in for a pretty bad fall when the quality of whatever they are making will suffer immensely.

What I do see happening is the roles and work those creatives do being modified a bit to "prompters" and then using the created thing as a concept or jumping off point. Which is going to be pretty suck in the short term (in terms of derivative art), but hopefully AI will improve at some point and that will be less of a problem.

No offense, but that is the most nothing statement I've ever heard about AI, and could be used to describe almost any field in technology (seriously, you can replace "AI" in what you said with something like "Video Games" or "The Internet" and it still makes sense).

This is what I'd expect to hear in a company's press release, not a forum full of personal opinions and thoughts.

So is there anyway you could elaborate in detail and actually share your personal thoughts on the matter? I'd love to hear them.

It worked, though, didn't it?
The AI generated bot text pulled you in.

No, I didn't make an actual hyperlink, was just casually mentioning the link.

The example is from this forum post:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?msg=636655592


(Here I will try to do it now facebook.com)

Maybe it works without brackets facebook.com

Nope.

I dunno if we should lock access to seeing complex features behind complex puzzles. If the purpose is to help the player understand how to implement reflections, for example, and reflections is considered a complex feature, it seems odd to require the player to either complete a maze or figure out which ingredients of a sandwich to give a guard so that they can access that room to see the reflection in action.

Then again, we could just incorporate debug mode into the usage of the game for that use case.

As for the interface, I am fine with not using a default template UI, and designing one from the ground up. As I understand it currently, there is no default interface template that is geared towards mobile (and yes, while the two-tap method exists, I feel that's an incredibly unnatural interaction to expect of the player, even if we give a tutorial for it).
As someone above suggested, we can do a 2 click interface (a modified BASS with a visible inventory), where the second click is for optional descriptive texts (could even be the way to access the tutorial/explanatory texts, since I doubt anyone would be playing the game on mobile if their aim was to learn from its code to develop their own game).

No reason to not have all of them, adjustable through the settings.
And by "all" I mean the ones trivially available through the templates (Sierra, LucasArts verblist, verbcoin, 2 click/bass)

[beginners]

One thing that must be kept in mind is this: This is a project for beginners. It should be a fun and interesting game, as all games should be, but the tutorial aspects must be clear and welcoming. Something that absolute newcomers to the very concept of game design will actually use and learn from.

Is this a given? Does it need to be a "fun and interesting game", or will this get in the way of it being a showcase/demo/explanation game? Which is prioritised (because, for example, I can't imagine a fun and interesting game constantly interrupting me to ask "Do you want to see how that was done?")?

If we want a "fun and interesting game", I recommend collaborating and just making a fun and interesting game, totally normal, like any other game, except it happens to be open source, and source be very nicely and documented and organised, and covering all the requirements listed above. The issue here would be finding a way to combine all the possibly incongruent features (multiple interaction methods, keyboard control, etc) into a single experience, but I'm sure the AGS community is up to that if we put our mind to it.

The other option is a game where the primary purpose is to showcase all the features, perhaps even at the cost of not being "fun and interesting". I'm imagining something like the previous demo game that we had, which was basically what people are suggesting now- barebones 'plot' with a few interactions to showcase how puzzles can work, each room having specific features showcased, rooms had signs so the player could walk to the ones they were interested in. Perhaps each feature would have a short in-game explanation as well (although I'm not sure about the effectiveness of going too far in making it into a "tutorial", text explanations in-game would be hard for someone who has their own game and wants to know how to implement a feature). Coupled with that, it would also obviously be open source, and all these features could be investigated in the well documented code.

Unrelated to the original search issue, but I figured I'd mention it here since this thread already existed:
it's really hard to search for single word terms. I don't know what the algorithm prioritises, but for example, if I search for "ports", I get inundated with threads and comments about "reports".