D: Enter/exit simulation. Entities can be taken out of the simulation for a moment and be under full design control. Since the entity is explicitly taken out for a reason, making it match the sim is less of a concern. However, re-entry can be difficult to setup in a transparent way.
rustedivan
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@albertcardona Very tangential, but I attended a wedding recently where one of the speakers withdrew his speech, because the LLM had given him the same speech the sister of the bride had made.
@vurtun @superfunc Amen. Also writing a game from scratch, and constantly catch myself being concerned about perf issues that actually don’t move the needle. Like, I know 35% of my frame time is spent generating and hashing uuidv4s in the hottest loop of the collision detection. I’ll replace that one day. Worrying about copying a handful 40-byte structs is… nothing.
@delegatevoid Yeh, recurring pattern: replace a simple linter, AST transform or static analysis with something infinitely more complex
@ghosttie I have, for work, this week, needed to escape a path through a pipeline of systems that all unescape. The conf file now reads \\\\\\\\fileshare\\\\path\\\\path…
C: Scale and bias simulation params to offset/strengthen/weaken responses. Push and pull the simulation towards fun with y=kx+m. k and m can be adjusted per entity and still remain part of the sim. Structured method of adjustment.
B: Segment the simulation into parts, and pass events between them. The emitted events are under designer control, and the receiving simulation can’t tell the difference. Clear design surface. Events must be reasonable, but side effects can be contained. Reduces combinatorial explosion of parameters.
A: Make the sim simply better. More fidelity, more realistic, capture more behaviours, use real-world experimental parameters. A bet that fidelity is fun. Trades design control for correctness. Changes can cause wide side effects.
Writing something about the tension between simulation and tech design in games. Simulation creates consistent and cohesive results, but not always the most fun results. Reaching into a simulation and tweaking it to make it more fun is difficult - it introduces tension, oscillation and unintended knock-on effects. Simulations aren’t always very readable to players.
Looking back through work diaries, I have found ~4 strategies. Are there others?