I personally wouldn’t call 1:2 “overwhelmingly”, but even so, if there was just a single male Venti in the whole game, it wouldn’t in any way make the claim “Plenty in gachas, jrpgs, and such” untrue, because these games combined have a lot of sexy twinks to pick from.

Genshin has plently of male characters (F to M is ~1:2 iirc), and there is a variety of niches covered: cute twink-like types like Venti, hot tall guys like Diluc, etc. Anyway, vote with your wallet. It’s only natural there are more girl characters if that’s what larger chunk of playerbase want.

A sexy twink.

Plenty in gachas, jrpgs, and such, imo.

We have a cult of toxic misogyny that insists everything MUST be male gaze and the only acceptable nudity is big titty girls and guys who look like Ahnold. And any divergence from that is “ruining games” or “being woke”

I think in heated discussions about “DEI slop” people mostly complain about women being desexualized rather than anyone else being sexualized. Do you have any examples of games where in addition to women being sexualized there were twinks or someone else being sexualized and people insisted that only women should be sexualized but not those other groups? Think of BG3 - it goes beyond regular “male gaze” but it’s still widely beloved because it’s more inclusive to wide range of appeals including regular ones.

This is meta-analysis.

I don’t follow how reverse engineering blizzard’s server makes the rich richer here. Blizzard doesn’t want that information to be public.

Free advertising for their product, free efforts to keep the fandom alive. Don’t downplay marketing - marketing is king. Marketing drives the money. Even when it’s unintentional. This is pure speculation, but in my opinion most private server players would never have bought a subscription if they hadn’t first gotten hooked by playing for free on pservers for a long time. And this is a game where people who enjoy it keep coming back for decades. I’d be very interested to see statistics on “how many players who started on free pservers eventually bought a subscription.” Personally, I casually played on and off for about 10 years before finally subscribing and spending a few years on the official Classic servers. I’ve seen plenty of others with the same story - it’s especially common among people from the third world, Eastern Europe, and so on. Without pservers, WoW might never have become as popular as it is today, and it could have been long dead by now.

They have the resources to be more unethical than you.

What does this even mean in context of deregulation? If nobody has to pay for lawsuits because there are no lawsuits, what difference does it make who has more money.

Specifically training it on content without permission?

Under current legal framework, it probably should be illegal, because it’s unfair and inconsistent that derivative works by people are illegal when derivative works by AI are not. But under my perfect legal framework, it all should be legal, and avoiding training on works of people who ask not to, should be a choice not enforced legally, which should be transparently communicated and affect which models people prefer to use or not to use.

AI capabilities are directly proportional to energy costs,

Ever heard of DeepSeek? Every once in a while people figure out how to do the same as previous state-of-art models using 1000x less resources. And OpenAI actually became open a month ago.

The expressed goal of AI companies is to create AGI capable of doing everything itself, not as a tool.

Great, let them do it. Let people be able to generate a great game by saying “make me a great game”. That’s fine. It might not be the game you actually wanted though, if you care about any details at all. Because it’s all in the details to the lowest level, to the level how exactly strokes are made, how colors are blended, etc, and when you start going into the details you need a granular model that you can use step by step, interwined with your manual work, manual sketching, etc - just like it works in programming now. Just like it programming some details and intricacies are pointless trying to describe in words because it’s easier and faster just to write few lines of code yourself, do some strokes yourself, etc.

So first off, telling someone who made a game that they should have made a general purpose engine instead completely misunderstands the intention or relative complexity involved.

I’m talking about Mangos and its forks here, they didn’t make a game, they made a server emulator. And by “general purpose MMORPG” I meant “general purpose WoW-like MMORPG”. When people develop sourceports for old games for example, those sourceports often work as general purpose platforms for similar games. Countless games based on GZDoom as example. Yet WoW emulator projects failed at this.

if they did any of the coding themselves

At Turtle WoW they definitely did some scripting, but sure they didn’t implement their own server emulator, that’s monumental work. That’s been going on for decades. Unpaid work with no way to benefit from it for community, unpaid work that only makes rich people richer and poor people poorer. If emu devs looked at it this way, maybe they would have also set a goal of making their own frontend as well instead of depending on WoW client and assets. And this would ultimately enable this whole ecosystem becoming a platform for “general purpose WoW-like MMORPGs”.

And yet, my guess is you would feel the exact opposite the moment it’s blizzard taking some small artist’s content and putting it in their games without compensation, no?

I hear this happening occasionally. Currently it’s uncomfortable because of unfairness with corpos being able to defend themselves legally better than individuals. But I don’t see this as a problem if anyone’s allowed to freely do and sell derivative works of anyone’s else content.

Is an AI trained on every artist’s content in order to generate new art and sell it for a profit “morally good” to you?

Yes, I’m totally good with AI and even though I used to think about myself as skeptic, at current point I’m more like heavily pro-AI. And I don’t think it makes artists obsolete in any way. We only have to wait a little bit until it becomes as granular and useful for artists as an intermediate tool in their workflow as it is for programmers now. Also I consider AI generations derivative work.

Ok, so then what is your criticism of Turtle WoW?

It’s not only Turtle WoW, it’s more criticism of the whole Mangos / WoW server emulation community. They were too naive and positive-thinking to jump into developing extremely-high-effort projects like this without planning ahead how exactly it will allow them personally and creators who build upon this to benefit/profit from their work, while also avoiding legal issues. Maybe they put too much trust into Blizzard being good guys and not moving forward with any lawsuits, maybe they were simply enthusiastic about technical side of things and ignored the big picture for too long. If they realized those points sooner, it could have become a general-purpose open-source MMORPG platform, not something that only works for WoW and makes people legally wrecked the moment they try to go further.

it is “morally good” that people regularly violate his copyright by creating those bumper stickers of Calvin pissing on various brands and sell them for their own profit, a profit that Watterson himself refuses to enjoy for the good of the art. But you disagree, and profits of others is more important?

It is “morally good” for people being able to freely do this. Whether you like it or not - it’s subjective. I personally most likely wouldn’t produce derivative works if author asked not to, especially with a stance like this, but that’s just a personal choice, and it’s case-by-case thing. If author is a massive retard like J. K. Rowling - it’s morally good for people to be able to ignore author wishes and opinions regarding their work/characters. And whether author is retard or not is also subjective. In the end, author should not dictate what other people do, including what other people do with their work.

If I understand your point correctly, it’s not the profit from the fan art that the creator gets, it’s that the fan art drives profit of their original artwork, right? Because we both agree that profiting from someone else’ IP is illegal, right?

It’s both, and what matters more to me is what works in practice. I consider it totally morally good to profit from content based on someone else’ copyrighted IP. Creator spent effort -> creator can sell their work. It’s sometimes illegal but it should always be legal. By the way, when something is illegal but you think it shouldn’t be, it’s a good soul practice to regularly commit crimes in this area (that you can get away with), to get used and psychologically comfortable with two simple facts:

• legal =/= right
• illegal =/= wrong

Similarly, there are many popular games who started as a mod for another mainstream title, gained support, and pivoted to their own independent game.

The scale is not comparable at all. 100% of artists hugely benefit from fan arts, while maybe 0.01% of modders of popular games benefit from their mods.

This is basically what I’m saying:

• creator profit & no corpo profit = good <- this where people building upon opensource gaming projects are
• no creator profit & no corpo profit = good <- this is where most of the modding for old/abandonware games is
• creator profit & corpo profit = good <- this is where most of fanart is
• no creator profit & corpo profit = bad <- this is where most of the modding for popular and live games like WoW and Minecraft is

It’s very different, in multiple ways. Artists earn money from commissions, the main mechanic to get more commissions is to become more popular. Algorithms on main platforms work by association. It’s as simple as this:

1. I draw my OCs, I want to do commissions.
2. Very few people are viewing my posts and are aware of me.
3. What do I do to attract more people, who will in turn buy more commissions?
4. Draw a fanart of popular character and/or a trending gimmick (your version of new Sonic x Miku meme, Miku birthday, you OC wearing Asuka cloth, you OC in Ghibli style, etc).
5. This posts gets pushed by algorithm into the feeds of people who like certain popular character or shown interest in current gimmick/meme/trend thing.
6. Some of those people enjoying post go to artist’s page and view their other works.
7. If they like what they see they might subscribe and order commissions later.

And the whole copyright thing is way less of an issue in fan arts, I regularly see a lot of people freely taking money for doing commissions of popular characters like Hatsune Miku for example, or characters from popular animes.

Lineage 2 also.

I’m fan of modding, but I wouldn’t want to waste my own time doing modding in cases like this. Outside of opensource projects, modding works well for old, effectively abandonware games, running on custom sourceports. Where almost everything is allowed and corpos don’t blatantly abuse peoples free work. I do mapping for Doom and Heretic. I play Minecraft mods occasionally but I wouldn’t want to waste my time doing Minecraft mods myself to support Microsoft Mojang mismanaging this game so bad. Theoretically Luanti could have been the solution, but it’s just damn bad because that particular kind of top-down approach to extensibility didn’t work well. Fan art is in much better place because it’s a mutual benefit: artists benefit from working with popular franchise because it draws attention to them.

Yeah, but that’s not cool. If you think about it harder, non-naive, you wouldn’t want to do any of this even at the point of realizing that you boost blizz/wow popularity for free, by doing a lot of hard work; you don’t even need to go deeper to the point of realizing you can’t build extended versions of wow this way legally, but this one is even worse.

I would say being unable to legally create/distribute new content based on blizzard-owned IP is the worst kind of being dependent on blizzard IP. If they at least had their own game client with fully FOSS assets, upon which people could create more and more new content freely, then yeah, that I would call independent.

This is true, but in gaming, open-source projects often have huge, incredible impact, which often goes way beyond their original scope. For example Doom sourceport GZDoom is nowadays often used to create completely new indie pixelart or retro-style shooter games, Morrowind sourceport OpenMW is also to my knowledge have started being used in standalone projects. It will take just a single open-source project that covers MMORPG genre somewhat decently to become a solid foundation.

Also true, but it’s manageable. Look at Godot for example - they had some huge drama regarding their moderation policies, also some drama regarding their development direction. People who were unhappy with one or the other created forks and continued there. It’s not perfect and problems are possible, but it’s far from being as disabling as corporate bs.

Back in the day, people were so idealistic that they poured cosmic amounts of time into reverse-engineering games like WoW - rebuilding its systems, network stack, and filling massive databases by hand. By making the game accessible and endlessly customizable (to the point where private servers could even create entirely new content), they unintentionally boosted and cemented its popularity for decades.

But over time, the rose-colored view faded. People began to see that neither Blizzard nor the gaming industry at large were as benevolent as they once imagined. Notice how this never happened again with newer games? WoW was both one of the first and one of the last MMORPGs to inspire that kind of community-driven pirate server scene.

In the future, I hope we will see a truly open-source, modding-first MMORPG - one that makes corporate nonsense irrelevant. So that players and hobbyists could put their energy into something 100% open-source Instead of wasting time building content for companies that don’t value them and would crush them the moment the numbers dip.

I keep speedrunning already-completed levels in Demon Turf, doing occasional dungeons runs in Atlyss and playing new Doom 2 mapsets.

Another bad faith / inexperienced take.

Also, what happens when the model generates an environment that can’t be traversed? What if it places invisible walls in weird places?

That’s also one of the reasons why it’s interesting. This happens a lot when implementing regular mapgen and you have to fix it until it only generates correct maps. AI can perceive what it generated and make sure certain invariants are holding and if not, modify map to fix it, and continue going and going. You can ask it to start with noise and carve space for villages and carve roads between them. You can ask to start with noise and quests and generate roads based on what makes sense for progression, and so on.

I only really enjoy WFC mapgens, simply because structures they come up with are largely driven by modular pieces and that produces interesting results for longer time (for me personally). I find noise/biome/temperature driven open-world worldgens boring af, and I get a feeling I’ve seen it all very very fast. AI can potentially produce unique structures in open-world worldgens way better than noise-based algorithms with basic heuristics on top of them. You mentioned quests, just consider that AI-based worldgen can generate/modify world based on those characters and quests. You can ask it to start with noises, then modify to arrange for villages/cities, then make sure there is nice road from village A to village B and landscape is modified to make this road nicely traversable, and if there is a quest, modify map in a way that the needed dungeon happens according to intended progression in the mountain between those villages, etc.

I want to see it myself real bad. The reason for this is actually very simple: more traditional handcoded worldgen algorithms usually operate with some basic noise functions controlled by some parameters like “biome” or “temperature” or “height” and then slap some heuristics on top to smooth rough edges or to introduce a bit more of interest. Those heuristics you code there are rather limited. You ofcourse could spend a lot of efforts and hardcode a lot of stuff there, but it’s still limited. And in practice they are most often are very limited. With AI though, what developers can hope for is multistep generation with self-feedback. We may manually model some prefabs, modular pieces and ask AI to stitch them together in a way that resembles some special symbol per map, possibly generating some intermediate pieces by itself if those are lacking, also come up with enemy placements and look at the thing at whole and try to rebalance it for certain difficulty, etc. It’s more flexible and it’s potentially unbounded. You can ask it to reprompt itself however times needed if it see there are some problematic places or missed opportunities in map it generated. You can give it a list of gimmicks and ask to try to compose and balance every map around random gimmick picked from this list. You can also ask it to roll a dice and with probability of 15% it will invent a gimmick itself instead of picking from the list. Possibilities are wild.

Is procedural world generation AI?

Its’ not if you don’t use AI for it. But, many many people wish they could use AI for worldgen to see what they can get out of it.

I’ve been playing QTR2 recently, which is a very good way to scratch the itch as well. Hyped to try the new Heretic episode “Faith Renewed” in re-release!

I beat Diablo 1 recently which I already written about in another thread. After that I decided to try Atlyss. Too early to give proper feedback, but I must say I enjoy it so far even though I find it a bit strange to have MMORPG gameplay loop in a singleplayer game. It does have lobby-based multiplayer though, and I haven’t tried that yet. Art direction in general is great, but models/textures are extremely lowpoly/lofi (with texture filtering on top of that, going for faithful PSX look I guess). Characters in particular look great, and there is a full-featured furry character creator.

Nice to know lore is consistent and connected between games. I should have written something like “idk why she looks like amazon from d2 though”, because I’m not deep into the lore of both games (don’t remember anything lorewise about d2, which I last played maybe 16 years ago). So my initial remark was purely about looks, which I still remember (maybe because screenshots or videos of d2 still pop in media quite often).

To me d1 rogue looks almost the same as d2 amazon, and d2 rogues in the camp are a bit different and less wild.

• d1 rogue: [1] [2]
• d2 amazon: [1]

In d2 rogues do seem to have either some cloth or plates on their hips. If you compare the color of their hips and hands, it’s different enough to consider that’s not skin and their hips ain’t naked.

Started Diablo 1 last week, picked Sorcerer. It was a tough but a fun ride until the very end when I discovered… that I bricked my character! Apparently you can’t be a mage and focus on magic exclusively since there are monsters in the very late-game (Blood Knights) who are fully resistant to anything you cast, and my points in non-magic talents were so low I could only equip starter weapons! Decided to re-roll a rogue (actually an amazon idk why they called her rogue). It’s been a blast, almost too easy for the first 5-6 dungeon floors. But from there difficulty picked up, and stayed on consistently challenging level till the very end. Killed Diablo himself by stashing full belt of greater mana potions and simply shooting him in point blank range while drinking potions under mana shield (book luckily bought from Adria in the very last moments). The game is great fun, atmosphere is extraordinary and music is god-tier (or should I say, diablo-tier).

I prefer Steam because I like having achievements, gallery of screenshots (I take hundreds/thousands of them for games I enjoy), backlog with notifications when items go on sale, all the forum/groups/review stuff, etc. If I were to pick purely politically, I would definitely choose GOG though. I wouldn’t ever consider Key Cards as that’s just the worst of both worlds (physical vs digital). Physical rarely makes sense, but I’d consider it for some super unique releases, for example a box release with usb of Morrowind + OpenMW + bunch of modpacks preinstalled including stuff like Tamriel Rebuilt etc + some nice physical stuff in the box like artworks or huge worldmap to put on your wall. But I can’t imagine a release like this being even remotely close to legally possible (because it’s a huge salad of licensed properietary paid content and opensource free content under a variety of licenses).

I think 4 of those games (including Postal) look very decent/promising, others either not my style or looking too generic/slop.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that anything “rewarding” doesn’t necessarily affect dopamine chemistry the way we used to talk about regarding game mechanics. After all, I’m not an expert in neurobiology, it might very well be the case that “dopamine rush” is a meme that simply takes a vague intuition of “dopamine is related to feeling of reward in the brain” to the absolute just for the sake of convenience of rhetoric device. But in reality, those things are more nuanced than that. There are many other neurotransmitters, neuromediators and in general things involved in brain signalling like serotonine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, etc, many of which are involved together in any “rewarding game situation” and interact in complex ways. To try to put it in more simple terms, the way you killed a bunch of goblins, the music that was on background, the scenery and palette, and the chest you open that they were guarding, affects dozens upon dozens of neuromediators that all interplay together in complex ways and form your experience, the way you feel, and gamers usually just ignore all that, focus only on the chest part and say “dopamine”. While in reality even the chest part alone isn’t just dopamine, and reward circuitry also isn’t just dopamine alone, and experiencing it is different depending on what you experience before/after and in parallel, and so on. What I didn’t like about the article is that it’s not about this topic at all and barely mentions it, basically there is a single sentence on it, but it’s used for the sake of clickbait title.

It’s past 178k now.

Its moddability/extensibility is way inferior to Minecraft, where you can change basically everything, including rendering, networking, main menu, sound engine, etc. Check my previous comment on my profile page.

In my opinion Luanti is a living proof that top-down extensibility aka “we make monolithic engine in C++ and then provide some APIs for scripting via bindings for some scripting language on the side” doesn’t work well. You can’t change main menu, you can’t fix player controller (and the default one sucks), you can’t write your own renderer, etc. Because developers didn’t imagine someone would want that (actually they probably did, but they simply don’t have capacity to provide this). Good extensibility/modability should be automatic, on binary level. Like what you get by developing in bytecode/JIT-compiled languages like Java/C# or in old Unreal Engines where everything was done in bytecode-(de)compilable special language called Unreal Script.

Well, I don’t really know what exactly they’re doing, but there are people like Elon Musk that probably have ways of converting cosmic volumes of crypto back and forth to/from fiat. I’d just assume that crypto -> fiat is more of a problem for individuals currently but huge businesses and corps can make it work in high volumes. So maybe Steam could make it work too for games. And then crypto becomes massively backed by games. And then maybe someone else big jumps in. And then someone smaller can also jump in, and then one day crypto might be backed by so many things that you don’t even need to leave ecosystem, because you can already buy pretty much anything there. But again, this is just assumption, I don’t know how exactly this should work. Perhaps big corps can register a crypto-branch of their business somewhere crypto-friendly.

If exchanges close, websites stop accepting them, and you can’t withdraw to fiat

You can still trade with people directly on forums/chats, like before exchanges existed.

Trading on non CEX is a massive pain as well

Why?

If exchanges close, websites stop accepting them, and you can’t withdraw to fiat

Even in the worst case scenario there is a possibility of anonymous crypto-only exchanges on darknets.

Storing for long time on cold wallets makes you vulnerable to volatility, which isn’t good for high amounts.

Agree, long-term storage on external wallet isn’t a good suggestion.

AML and KYC

Ofc KYC is everywhere. But that is only relevant to inputting fiat to crypto. Are there precedents of exchange asking its user about the address where he sent his crypto? Even then, what exactly happens if you answer them with whatever, like you donated to some guy, or it was a present? Regular money laws don’t apply to crypto -> crypto transfers, they are not subject to whatever taxes for presents, charity, etc, and even if they were, that wouldn’t be for the sending side.

Also, do you realize that even if all exchanges are taken down, this doesn’t in any way harm crypto in general or any of your independent wallets? I mean, you should only look at exchanges as places to input and forex trade crypto, but you should always output it to your external wallets in the end for long-term storage. If some day some exchange suddenly asks any of its users to explain why they did send money to a certain address, that would be the death of this exchange. You don’t need to explain, it is not bank, there are no taxes to pay (you already paid all the taxes before you converted your money to crypto), there are no laws that could make this demand legal. Move to the next exchange.

Who is gonna ask? It is not your bank account, there are no rules where you send your crypto and you don’t have to explain to anyone. And there are no ways to enforce any of this. Also, a lot of crypto payment services and exchanges automatically generate unique intermediate wallets for every transaction. There is a technique to wallet management called “Hierarchical Deterministic Wallet (HD Wallet)” which seems to be golden standard nowadays, not only it makes it hard to compute your total balance, it also makes it easier to achieve “public address changes with every transaction”. So this is what most exchanges use for those intermediate addresses I assume.

No, they don’t know who that wallet belongs to and even though they may hypothesize its yours they don’t have any way to prove it. Moreover, anyone, including sellers can use unlimited amount of wallets and register them at rate 1000x faster than even the advanced CIA group would be able to tie even a single address to a particular person/company. So if Steam operated in crypto, it would take days/weeks of some of the most advanced feds in the world to try to prove that you bought something from Steam using your crypto. And they might even fail at that if you or Steam’s wallet are handled carefully, and they wouldn’t even know what exactly you bought.

Okay, how exactly will this allow to ban selling legal porn games via blockchain? Because this is what is happening with payment processors.