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Carl [he/him]

@ Carl @hexbear.net

Posts
27
Comments
2302
Joined
1 yr. ago

  • Another fun fact is that he (and many of the other tos cast members) stole the production wigs for the films and wore them around regularly, which I find extremely funny.

  • It's my favorite cartoon since Aqua Teen, one of my top of all time no question.

  • I dig this take, I just wish that the game had made this more explicit

  • ba dop ba daaaaa

    ba dop ba daa ba daaa ba daa ba daaaaaaaa

  • Can't get foolled again

  • Hell yeah.

    I've had this idea for a zelda clone where the "trading sidequest" is to build a motorcycle. It's all very half baked but I think it follows in the spirit of making your game about things in the real world instead of about other games.

    The only exception to this rule that comes to mind for me is Tunic, but that game seeks to capture the experience of figuring out how to play a game from instructions in another language, so even though it's meta it works.

  • This is true for so many things. Legend of Zelda is based on Miyamoto's experience exploring caves in the Japanese countryside, whereas every single forgettable LOZ clone is based on LOZ.

  • listening back to the AMCA kotor 2 coverage, and I realized something about my relationship to this game after playig it probably dozens of times throughout my life, which that I know literally nothing about any of the party members except atton, kreia, visas, and handmaiden.

    The reason is that once I get Handmaiden and Visas in my party (with the femme exile thanks to modding), what I have is essentially a three-person Magical Girl team in star wars.

    The Exile is the older one, she's a bit sisterly and she's the former student council president. Then Handmaiden is the youngest one, full of fire and potential but a bit naive. Then Visas is a goth girl who's just gotten out of an abusive relationship. It's a classic trio.

  • Rampage is a fun game

  • my windows vm is having trouble installing because of "oobe" which is very funny to me because it sounds like boobie, I wonder if I should abandon trying to use (a hacked version of) windows 11 and get a 10 or even 8 iso, not like I'm gonna use this thing for anything but occasionally letting someone remote into my laptop for work..

  • have a couple've social/utility/general noncombat spells they can use separate from standard spell slots

    I would think that cantrips play this role already, plus the gritty realism strongly incentivizes taking the feats that grant a level 1 spell 1/day. If it becomes a problem that the casters don't have noncombat abilities and aren't contributing to the game I would drop a few wands, scrolls, or potions with neat non-combat abilities.

  • kinda, spells only scale to the slot level now, not caster level, but casters still have a lot of options that non-casters just don't. It's telling that probably the best origin feat in the game for most non-casters is Magic Initiate.

  • American Prairie is a nature preserve. They're telling them that they have to move all of the 63k bison that they manage into private lands.

  • I had to dig my car out with an entrenching tool last time it snowed where I live, if it happens again I'm gonna drive it out of my cul de sac and park in front of the propane business across the street.

  • woman gets shot

    "She/her! Blue hair! LESBIAN GROOMER!"

    man gets shot

    "Did you see anybody defending the shooting yesterday? I didn't."

    I'm not saying it's misogyny, but - wait, no, that's exactly what I'm saying.

  • Sam Seder telling Tim Pool he doesn't care about the morality of Thanos

  • To the average American, "Communism" just means "dictatorship," which is part of why I'm a tankie in the first place because I think we need to fight to reclaim the word.

  • Ah that's the thing they banned from f1, super cool

  • Back to working on Pykrieg today, big update coming up as I'm working on the first computer opponent! Right now my only goal is to have something that a) advances towards the opponent arsenal and b) maintains its lines of communication at least semi effectively, but this has proven a much more difficult task than I thought it would be.

    Right now the way it works is I get a list of all legal moves from the engine and evaluate them based on predefined criteria, give scores to each move based on how well or poorly it is evaluated, and then choose randomly from the top moves according to the scoring system. The result so far is pretty bad, but I'm not worried about the computer's strength yet, just making something that works. The current canonical computer implementation of this game also has really bad AI, so I remain optimistic that I can make something better given time.

    It is very interesting watching the behavior change wildly as I make small adjustments to the move scoring parameters, +50 "maintain adjacency" causes all of the movement to become uselessly conservative as the AI refuses to march across the map, +25 "advance towards enemy arsenal" causes the AI to throw all caution to the wind in a mad dash towards the opponent's command structure, outrunning its lines of communication in the process. A common failure mode I keep running into is that the AI loses contact with its combat units and then charges in with its relays instead of reestablishing communication.

    I've even seen some cool emergent behaviors! There's an "interpose defensively" modifier that spots when an arsenal is threatened and tries to move a unit to protect it, and I've seen the North player preposition infantry in a mountain pass defending their arsenal and keep them there all game, effectively reacting to the South player threatening to attack through it and blocking off the possibility. But most games between two AI opponents currently end in either a stalemate or with one of the AIs accidentally checkmating itself.

    In general my AI seems to handle the "South" player much better than it does the "North" player, primarily because the North player can't figure out how to get its units around the South player's mountains, while the South player has a straight shot through the North player's mountain pass... eventually. Every game that ends takes 200 moves or more, which is not at all how long this game takes with human players.

    I've been thinking I might learn how to do a machine learning thing to optimize the values, but I have no idea where to start with that. I wrote a pytest that has two AI opponents play a headless game against each other at processor speed, which is probably step one, and I guess I should make a list of values to test and have them play against each other hundreds of times while recording the results to see which values make for the strongest opponent. So I guess I do know where to start after all.