Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | danbolt's commentslogin

I sometimes wonder if the verbosity gives the LLM more “margin for error” when generating text that passes requirements.

It's simpler. The verbosity, the line of code count, is what has gotten people excited about it. So everyone optimizes for verbosity.

This does not strike me as true at all. Nobody's crowing about the verbosity of their AI-generated code. Rather, it seems to me they're impressed by the functionality or capabilities relative to time/cost.

10 lines of checks per line of actual execution. Anxiety for their stable pay

Of course. Those 10 lines of extra code is that much more tokens every time your agents read and use that section of code. The more blot in the project to more tokens your agents will burn.

Reminds me of a subcontracting agency

Spector was in his mid-forties when Deus Ex was released, System Shock a few years before that.

I wonder if he’s an exception that proves the rule like you mention, or if his experiences in his youth working on tabletop games contributed to his design sensibilities in the 90s.


Part of me always felt the wacky setting helped with the player’s sense of anticipation.

Or, you’re always learning new things and encountering new elements, be it plot, interactions, or simply exploring. The replayability ends up feeling quite arcade-y too, trying for a particular outcome.


It’s also worth noting that the EA studio that makes FIFA has been continuously doing so for over twenty years. It’s not being handed off between studios and rebuild operational expertise over and over.

If anything, FIFA was probably getting an incredible deal from EA given the cost of making AAA games today.


Claire makes a good point about standards improving require people complaining about their faults. Those gripes affect the discourse!


I send around 20 a year. Checking the mail is relatively monotonous for people, so receiving one is like a lucky gacha pull in today’s world.

Since they’re so memorable, it’s usually an easy way to make someone’s day without much time, money or effort. There’s also very little scrutiny in what you write, so even an in-depth episode about sun glare at the bus stop goes a long way.


I think the big reason they get such good framerates is their conservatism with shader counts. A staff member mentions that in an interview with DigitalFoundry for Doom: The Dark Ages. I wonder if their in-house technology made such restraint easier.

Compared to other engines, making a new material asset is easy for someone less technical to do willy-nilly.


For sure, if you restrict what can (and can't) be done in shaders you can optimize buffer layouts and rendering passes, not allow things that explode shader permutations/switching or explode shader instruction count and kill occupancy.

The flip side is the artists loose control and cannot author custom materials.


> The flip side is the artists loose control and cannot author custom materials.

...which is a good thing tbh. No game needs hundreds or thousands of custom materials.


I think it can actually be a bit better in terms of artistic consistency to have a fixed set of materials you can work with in a given game. Very important if you want any sort of stylized rendering!


You’re certainly right, especially for the AAA games coming off the presses, but it’s not always true with certain indie games, especially if they’re doing a physical print run long after publishing.

You can occasionally get one where a very final version copies straight off a PS5 disc.


If that were the case, I think we would have already seen a turbocharged AI fork of Godot by now.

Or, if the machine-generated programming is that good, it shouldn’t be prohibitively difficult to surpass the handwritten version.


> In my opinion, disc based games have been a ridiculous way to sell modern games because they are physically incapable of storing the amount of game data required for modern AAA games

I’ve worked on a few AAA games with large install sizes, and I personally don’t believe this to be true. Or, I think it’s due to a lack of financial/organizational incentive to skim things down. The cost of storage and distribution is offloaded to the digital marketplace and consumer. Nobody’s KPI is tracked to the download size.

In projects of that size, you’re often trowling through a big proprietary graph of assets. This might be akin to UE’s reference viewer, or maybe less sophisticated. It’s hard to do and very unlikely to be on the roadmap.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: