I’m just not a fan of the lemmy “black and white” AI is evil approach.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s some spaces for AI (LLM’s), but they are significantly more limited than what people are led to believe.

For example, Tom Scott made a video where he fed in a list of his previous video titles into ChatGPT and asked it to generate >100 new video titles. While a lot of them contained halucinated facts that obviously wouldn’t work, he ended up with about 10 that could have been interesting videos had he decided to make them, and others led him to do research that gave him more ideas for videos. But it only kickstarted the creatice process.

Another example is modding, particularly Skyrim. Over the past couple of years there’s been a number of dialogue expansion mods coming out to add depths to characters with their original voices without janky voice splicing. While some people like to bemoan the use of AI in these cases and argue that people should use real voice actors, they are conveniently ignoring that very were very few mods filling this niche before ElevenLabs and the ones that did redo voices tended to be controversial (like Serana Dialogue Addon). But much of this problem is driven by the fact that modding is (supposed to be) free and most decent voice actors want to be paid for their work.

But in terms of commercial ventures, there’s little reason why AI should be involved. AI actively makes coding harder due to errors. You don’t need AI generated placeholder assets, as traditionally you would use boxes and things poorly drawn in MS Paint. Hell, it’s better to use crappy placeholder assets because that forces the dev to make the gameplay actually fun, since the assets aren’t skewing the playtesters’ opinions to be better than they should. And we had decent search for awhile, AI didn’t make it significantly better than it was 5 years ago.

And with regards to not being willing to spend money, there’s the old saying of “you have to spend money to make money”. It’s an investment, and if you’re not willing to invest, you don’t deserve to make money off the venture. Same philosophy of how employers that are unwilling to pay their employees a living wage should go out of business

Skill issue (literally).

Have you never heard of this thing called Fiverr? Or contract work in general? If you don’t have a particular set of skills, normally you just hire someone that already has them

Except people like you

Fucking stop right there. Don’t presume what I think. You have no idea what my stance is on purchased assets because I haven’t said anything on that topic.

You clearly are unable to make an argument without resorting to a strawman.

your luddite pearl-clutching hold me back.

Go ahead, Elon. I doubt you’re going to sell many copies of your game with that attitude. Especially if Valve bans you from their store for deliberately lying about your game not having AI

Many of those Youtubers get paid to play those games, and the ones catering to younger audiences are particularly bad at providing those disclaimers

Or UE5, since it’s an unoptimized mess

Inb4 asset stores become >90% AI generated

There’s been so much art and so many game produced every year before ChatGPT became big. If not using AI meant that we’ll only get slightly more indie games each year instead several times more indie games each year, I think we’ll manage without.

There’s already more art available than any human could consume in their lifetime. We don’t have to push out slop to keep people entertained

But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t lower the skill floor for someone.

No, it DOES. In fact, it RAISES the skill floor.

How is a dev supposed to be able to find an error in the code if they don’t know how to code?

As a programmer, most of your time isn’t actually spent writing code. It’s mostly spent debugging. An amateur programmer relying on AI is minimizing a task that takes a minority of their time while maximizing a task that takes the majority of their time.

For amateur programmers, AI isn’t an asset, it’s a liability.

This. Unless you’re modding, PC gaming isn’t complicated. Every game nowadays automatically picks out options based on your hardware specs. While tuning options are there, they’re not required

That didn’t work out for GTA back in the day

Can we please wait until wayland can actually replace x11

Unfortunately there’s always devs that refuse to change so long as their setup still works, even if there’s significantly better alternatives. The only option for dealing with them is to rip off the bandaid. Either they’ll put in the work to keep up or they’ll fall into obscurity

Brits use Challenger 2. Also, the M1is called the Abrams, not Abraham

There’s still at-home streaming. I just upgraded to an RX 9070XT so I can stream 4k60 to my TV through my Steam Deck using Sunshine and Moonlight.

Granted, a big reason why I did that was because they were selling for $600 a week ago on Newegg. Plus I didn’t want to have to fight Nvidia drivers on Linux while trying to mod Skyrim to hell

I don’t see how Valve can be expected to match that price range.

They don’t have to. Even if the sticker price is $50 more and the console equivalent, for a lot of people that’s a better value because you don’t have to pay >$100 per year for online services.

And if it’s priced the same as a similarly spec’d PC, there’s still wiggle room there. Are they comparing to a custom-built PC? Or are they comparing to a prebuilt?

I don’t want to have to code anything.

You don’t have to code anything. You just look through the game system browser, pick what you want, and after a few seconds it’s installed.

We don’t need automation. I want simplicity.

Then screenshare over Discord while drawing things in MS Paint. It’s simple and it’s not automated, just like you asked

global variables

vomits

It sounds like a Steam Deck is a perfect fit for you then. May your frames be high and your lag minimal

Before you go in on a Steam Deck I want to give a head’s up:

While I like my Steam Deck, it does have limits. If you primarily want to play 2D indie games, it’s absolutely perfect. You get great framerate, and the battery lasts 3-4 hours or sometimes even more.

But if you want to play 3D games from the last 10-15 years, you’re going to need to compromise. Much of the time you won’t be able to get 60fps, and the battery life drops off quick. And if you want to dock it and run it on your TV you’re still going to have some performance tradeoffs due to the Steam Deck being built for 800p gaming

If you still have a powerful tower PC but want to play newer 3D games from your living room on a TV, you could run an application called Sunshine on it, allowing you to stream to a Steam Deck via Moonlight at high bitrate (4k 60fps with relatively low latency) and the Steam Deck is good for that because it has more power to encode/decode the stream than most alternatives.

Or you could wait for the Steam Machine to release. It won’t be as powerful as a PS5, but I’m expecting it to be a good value compared to most PC’s

Ubisoft being shit isn’t anything new though. They’ve had plenty of time to jump ship to something better

Steam OS doesn’t support Nvidia or Intel hardware. You’d be better off installing Bazzite