fonix232

KSP2 comes to mind

Portability is not really an aspect one needs to consider when it comes to a NAS. Performance hits? Z1 will have performance issues when running in a simple mirror (especially for writes), but with 4+ disks that reduces significantly.

Sure scrubs will take longer on a multi-disk array, but again for a home NAS, the goal is maximising data storage capacity without a major hit on performance, ideally being able to saturate the most common gigabit LAN connection and have some more bandwidth available for local processing.

Meta sold Quest headsets at a loss to cover the market. Valve sold the Index for profit.

And beyond the aggressive pricing, the one major benefit over other miniPC makers is the extensive support.

I have a Minisforum mini PC. Took Minisforum over a year to release BIOS updates that were finished in March 2024… and against all CS promises it still hasn’t fixed the initial discrepancies (advertised as the only 8945HS mini PC that can go over 57W due to their improved cooling, and the only Ryzen 8000 series APU that can handle RAM at 5400-5600MT/s - still can’t get power over 57W and even though I have compatible RAM, it refuses to clock over 4800MHz, and there’s no option to configure it either).

Meanwhile Valve is still dropping improvements on the Steam Deck, 3.5 years after release.

Based on the specs it is a bit bumped up Ryzen 7000/8000 series (Zen 4 arch), with a beefed up GPU (sounds to be about two 780Ms soldered together with a bit of overclocking).

I wouldn’t be surprised if MS wanted a mid-generation upgrade to the Xbox but the current economic situation put a damper on it before the hardware could fully materialise and AMD ended up with a practically ready for production APU they couldn’t sell to anyone before Valve strolled up.

You’re incredibly wrong on your assumptions here.

First of all, ZFS (the file system TrueNAS specialises for) is best used with at least 3-4 disks. The more the better. A dual disk setup for ZFS (or any other kind of RAID) is super wasteful.

Second, no, 4TB won’t be enough. You think it is today, but soon you’ll be downloading media Linux ISOs and quickly realise that even 16TB is a stretch within a year.

My recommendation would be going for at least 4x 4TB, but 3-4x 6TB or even 8TB would be probably preferred. And similarly, I’d rather overshoot the initial purchase rather than realise 6-8 months in that oops, the 2-4 disk system you got isn’t enough… Even if you don’t fill the bays, I’d recommend you go for at least a 4 bay system, but rather, for 6. Sadly, SOHO NASes aren’t designed with easy expandability down the line.

And your comment also counts for jackshit since you provided no evidence of your claims, not even your own experience.

So you can fuck right off, buddy.

I have worked on games, and have a good understanding of the workflows involved.

You’ll obviously still need to do the creative parts manually (and should!) but the majority of the work involving the engine core build and the specific game coding, that can all be sped up borderline exponentially.

But I’m glad that someone with absolutely no understanding of the topic does their best to call out those who do show some experience on the topic just because they don’t get a neatly pre-chewed and pre-digested reply detailing all the information they lack and are unwilling to look it up themselves. As a next step would you like me to cut your steak up and feed it to you byte by byte, or tuck you in at night?

Alright I did read further and damn, you just keep going on being wrong, buddy!

Yes, you can fucking do “stand on the table and make a speech” work. You know how? By breaking it up into detailed steps (pun intended), something that LLMs are awesome at!

For example in this case the LLM could query the position and direction of the table compared to the NPC and do the following:

• plan a natural path between the two points (although the game engine most likely already has such a function)
• make the NPC follow that path
• upon path end, it will instruct the NPC to step onto the table via existing functions (Skyrim pretty much has all these base behaviours already coded, but the scripting engine should also be able to modify the skeleton rig of an NPC directly, which means the LLM can easily write it)
• then the script can initiate dialogue too.

I’ve asked Perplexity (not even one of the best coding agents out there, it’s mistake ratio is around 5%), and within seconds it spit out a full on script to identify the nearest table or desk, and start talking. You can take a look here. And while my Papyrus is a bit rusty, it does seem correct on even the third read-through - but that’s the fun part, one does not need trust the AI, as this script can be run through a compiler or even a validator (which let’s be honest is a stripped down compiler first stage) to verify it isn’t faulty, which the LLM can then interact with and iterate over the code based on the compiler feedback (which would point out errors).

now mind you this is the output of an internet-enabled, research oriented LLM that hasn’t been fine-tuned for Papyrus and Skyrim. With some work you could probably get a 0.5B local model that does only natural language to Papyrus translation, combined with a 4B LLM that does the context expansion (aka what you see in the Perplexity feed, my simple request being detailed step by step) and reiteration.

You’d also be surprised just how flexible game engines are. Especially freeroaming, RPG style engines. Devs are usually lazy so they don’t want to hardcore all the behaviours, so they create ways to make it simple for game designers to actually code those behaviours and share between units. For example, both a regular object (say, a chair) and a character type object (such as an NPC) will have a move() function that moves them from A to B, but latter will have extra calls in that function that ensure the humanoid character isn’t just sliding to the new position but taking steps as it moves, turns the right direction and so on. Once all these base behaviours are available, it’s super easy to put them together. This is precisely why we have so many high quality Skyrim mods (or in general for Bethesda games).

And again, code quality in LLMs has come a VERY long way. I’m a software engineer by trade, and I’d say somewhere between 80-90% of all the code I write is actually done by AI. I still oversee it, review what it does, direct it the right way when it does something silly, but those aren’t as minor functionalities as we’re talking here. I’ve had AI code a full on display driver for a microcontroller, with very specific restrictions, in about 4 hours (and I’d argue 2 of that was spent with running the driver and evaluating the result manually then identifying the issue and working out a solution with the LLM). In 4 hours I managed to do what otherwise would’ve taken me about a week.

Now imagine that the same thing only needs to do relatively small tasks, not figure out optimal data caching and updating strategies tied to active information delivery to the user with appropriate transformation into UI state holders.

Okay I won’t even read past the first paragraph because you’re so incredibly wrong that it hurts.

First generation LLMs were bad at writing long batches of code, today we’re on the fourth (or by some metric, fifth) generation.

I’ve trained LLM agents on massive codebases that resulted in <0.1% fault ratio on first pass. Besides, tool calling is a thing, but I guess if I started detailing how MCP servers work and how they can be utilised to ensure an LLM agents doesn’t do incorrect calls, you’d come up with another 2-3 year old argument that simply doesn’t have a foot to stand on today.

My own fucking experience. Which I’ve already explained in detail above.

By improving the cadence of projects.

A project costs X amount because of the standard template of pay per time unit Y multiplied by timeframe in time unit Z.

Simply said if you have 100 people working on the project, that costs 100Y per hour. If the project takes 6 months (approx. 960 hours), you multiply the two and get that your costs are 96000Y.

Now the two ways to reduce this is to either reduce the number of employees, with AI you can get rid of maybe 2/3, reducing the expenses to 32000Y…

Or since AI speeds up almost every workflow by about 8 to 10 times, you can keep all the people, but cut down project time from 6 months to about 2 months, which doesn’t just reduce the expenses by the same 2/3 but also increases potential profits for the same 6 month period by 200%, as instead of one product you’re releasing three.

Cutting jobs ain’t the only way to reduce costs with AI.

How do you think most game scripting engines work?

Nowadays game engines don’t rely on strictly speaking hardcoded behaviour, but rather are themselves just a scripting environment to execute a specific format of code.

Skyrim is still the perfect example because it gives you the ability to literally do anything in the world, via a scripting language.

Instructing NPCs to behave in a specific way is also done through these scripts. And LLMs - especially coding fine-tuned ones which could be tied into the execution chain - can easily translate things like <npc paces around> to specific instructions so the NPC walks up and down at a specific distance or in a circle or whatever you want it to do.

You’re seriously over-estimating the work it takes on even crappy, but modern engines to get certain things to happen. Especially when it comes to things that are already dynamically scripted. Like NPCs.

Which is a different article about a (somewhat) unrelated topic.

Using AI for development is already out there, and you can’t put that genie back in the bottle. As an engineer I’m already using it in my daily work for tons of things - I’ve built separate agents to do a number of things:

• read work tickets, collate resources, create a work plan, do the initial footwork (creating branches, moving tickets to the right states, creating Notion document with work plan and resources)
• read relevant changes in UI design documents and plan + execute changes (still needs some manual review but e.g. with Android Jetpack Compose, it makes 90-95% of the needed work and requires minimal touch-up)
• do structural work - boilerplates, etc.
• write unit and integration tests, and already working out a UI test automation agent
• do code reviews on changes, document them, and write appropriate commit messages
• do PR reviews - I still review them myself but an extra eye is always helpful

guess what, AI didn’t replace me, it just allowed me to focus on actually thinking up solutions instead of doing hours of boilerplate stuff.

AI isn’t the enemy in software development. Companies who think they can replace engineers with AI. Middle managers will sooner be on that date, as they were mostly useless anyway.

Yes it is trivial.

LLM can already do tool calling, emotion metadata output and so on. It would take minimal effort for a well tuned model to also output things like facial expressions, body language, hand and body movements and so on.

Sorry but procedural generation will never give you the same result as a well tuned small LLM can.

Also there’s no “hoping”, LLM context preservation and dynamic memory can be easily fine-tuned even on micro models.

That’s… not what this is about?

The point of integrating AI into games is to provide further diversity within the game.

Think Skyrim. By default you’re limited to 3-4 discussion options, right? Imagine now, if you will, that you could just… type in anything, including emotional markers, and have the characters respond interactively to the statement and tone. No longer are you bound by limited dialogue in RPGs.

visual generative AI will just spice up the visuals - hopefully. Things like repetitive textures and such will disappear as the game generates brand new textures for each grid element. Or create tons of background characters without the need to specify them. The list goes on.