That’s an amazing project. It’s kinda sad that nowadays most AAA games are so locked down that the player will never get into modding.
For myself it started with Jedi Knight, and then eventually mods on the Source engine (CS:S / HL2). To me it’s a good way to get people excited about the possibilities of programming at a fairly young age.
Nobody locks the games down. Most games with highly active modding scenes were never supposed to be modded, they all had to be reverse engineered or the source leaked. No tools, no engine modifications, nothing. DOOM, GTA, Mario 64, STALKER, Minecraft, the list goes on and on. Games like TES, ArmA, Quake, anything Source/GoldSource based are exceptions. And even then all major Bethesda games are heavily reverse engineered, the Morrowind engine got rewritten basically from scratch and the other games have a ton of fixes and sideloaded code. There's even an entire vehicle simulator (!) strapped on top of Fallout: New Vegas, which is absolutely insane if you know anything about its engine.
It all comes down to two things, player interest and the range of expertise/amount of work and coordination required for your mod to fit the base game. For example STALKER SoC has a lot more story mods than, say, Skyrim, because SoC is pretty janky: it has few animations and voiceovers are reserved to key plot moments, so it doesn't take much to match the quality.
Modding has always worked like that. Mods have always been unpayed work for the benefit of the game community, which ultimately also works to the benefit of the game publisher.
Yes but it’s typically a subset of players making/using them and not the cornerstone of the entire product. They also dangle the promise of making money in front of people, but when you dig into the specifics it’s actually very hard to get paid. You have to cross a certain threshold to even eligible for a payout even if you have accrued a little cash.
The relationship of kids making stuff (the vast majority with little to no compensation) for a private, for-profit company is incredibly direct. That’s why it leaves a sour taste for many of us.
In the past, Valve has hired some of their most longest-tenured employees from modding, although not necessarily on GoldSrc - Counter-Strike and QuakeWorld Team Fortress come to mind. (But of course never Richochet.) The Narbacular Drop team came straight out of DigiPen with a noncommercial thesis project as well.
That's what the marketing materials say, and that's what they want you to think. In practice it's very difficult to break even on it, even if you have a "successful" game.
That is how I became serious about programming. I played around a bit but I never really wrote anything useful until I started playing Asheron's Call. I learned C++ to write bots and other plugins for Decal (an embedded mod framework).
Yeah I go bouldering even on off days to “stay in the rhythm”. And I do have honestly terrible days where I feel I’m struggling climbs of even a grade below my comfort level, but at least I went lol.
When would you date the beginning of the current fall though? Late 20th/early 21st century? When would you end date it without longer hindsight? (honest question)
The fall of the Bretton Woods system was inevitable due to trade imbalances that ballooned in the 1960s. The U.S. Dollar was pegged to an artificially high value and the French central bank was right to arbitrage it by withdrawing specie. Simply resetting all the exchange rates was not sufficient, especially since the Federal Reserve under Nixon continued inflating the currency. The need to have variable rates was decades in the making.
Speaking completely out of my ass in the interest of stimulating thought on the matter: the fall of the Bretton Woods system was not inevitable, and the trade imbalances of the 1960s were mere symptoms of the true source of the collapse of our ability to maintain the peg.
Post-war, we embarked on a number of massive and economically-inefficient expeditions, driven largely by xenophobia and racism, which inflated the labor and time costs of American life across the board, both in the short and long terms, and made monetary inflation a necessity in order to forestall an economic collapse. The most prominent of these are the creation and expansion of suburban America and the car and consumer cultures required to make it possible, and the expansion of the military-industrial complex in the midst of the Cold War.
An America that had spent the 40s, 50s, and 60s continuing to build densely (reaping the benefits of efficient servicing of public needs), and focusing industry on export-ready products and services (preempting trade imbalances), would not have incurred the ever-rising costs of creating and maintaining sprawl, and would have benefited from pro-trade spending that actually delivered a return rather than falling into a black hole.
If I might be slightly hyperbolic: American hubris and intolerance blew up the American experiment about 80 years ago. It's just been exploding very, very slowly.
You're factually right. The high government spending of the 1960s was avoidable. By the 1970s, the loss of the peg was inevitable due to what happened in the previous decade.
I have a more sanguine feeling about America's development through its short history. It embarked on a series of many experiments, many which were successful and many which had terrible externalities. At the time, most people thought they were doing the most reasonable thing. For example, the huge benefit one family got from owning a car, it would follow that all families owning one would have even more benefits. It turned out that suburbanization hits scaling limits, but it was not immediately apparent at the time.
Overall, the standard of living for the median American is higher than it was in the 1960s and 1970s. However, the immediacy of information has caused widespread anxiety. In the 1990s and 2000s, we thought the same optimistic thoughts about interconnected information networks.
I have faith that we will adapt to this new reality, just in time for the next technological wave to catch us off guard. Maybe it will be cheap artificial intelligence.
When I think of the current social and political trends, I'm reminded of Asimov's quote about anti-intellectualism in 1980. Or Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer-prize winning book, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life", published in *1963*.
These things aren't new. They just wax and wane in power, over time, and recombine in new and interesting ways to yield long-term trends.
In the case of Rome, it depends how you define "fall". There were certainly some military setbacks and also some bad climatic conditions (which affected central America and China around the same time.) Probably better to say that Rome was in decline for a long time.
Your proposed solution is in itself a privacy nightmare. Imagine Apple having to know your entire network of non-apple users just to not mess up your videos with friends.
You have to specifically identify and name the people in the photos, otherwise all it knows is that it's a person and throws it into that folder. And if you don't use icloud none of it leaves your device. It does the photo processing locally on the phone. It only knows what you tell it.
I've never took any action it just recognizes faces of those ive taken a good amount of pics with and shows them in my network including automatically naming some of them. Tho not all of them seen under People & Pets have their name automatically listed. But and again it automatically already knows whose in my network so if I take a pic of them using my Apple Glasses the glasses tech or app on iPhone could have the pic focused on them and either blur out others in public or anonmyize/randomize all other faces. This is just an idea that would help solve people's concern with smart glasses and Apple is the privacy company.
That’s not how it works. Being trained a ton of human text doesn’t mean you can complete the next token for a program that needs to be logically coherent.
Imagine all your data is Reddit threads and now I ask you what follows “goto”, how would Reddit help you?
The opposite is likely true - there isn’t a ton of publicly available cobol code compared to e.g React, so an LLM will degrade.
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