danbolt

Interestingly, the Kimi one seems to implement the safe spot bug from the arcade original [1], while the Claude one doesn’t.

The prompt says that the agent shouldn’t look up existing implementations on the internet, so I’m guessing that the implementation is baked in?

[1] https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Pac-Man/Tips

I’ve definitely been on teams where they ran the numbers, and found that they were mostly working with smaller containers, and std::vector was the way to go.

If you’re down to that sort of decision-making, you have to measure.

I’ve read a few different experiences with hosts having had success with Anubis to cut down on excessive scraping. One that comes to mind is the Dolphin project.[1]

I’ve read a few of those threads, but often it’s people at cross-purposes with the goals of Anubis. Is there a chance you could clarify the “not working” bit?

[1] https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2025/06/04/dolphin-progress-rep...

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

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.

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.

I don’t have a horse in the race and I’m speaking from ignorance, but I noticed that Valve’s offering only requires 300W of power. That sounds very appealing for the sort of games I play.

Would it be difficult to make a PC with a similar power/performance profile?

This is often win-win as the junior ends up with a robust list of resume bullets that help push their career forward.

Reconciling is my least favourite part. It always feels like everyone’s checkout is a unique blend of local files and permissions you have to fix up now and then. It can be hard to keep track of how much one’s deviated.

I can understand how git isn’t always appropriate for less technical workflows and large file sizes, but p4 pain is its own character.

I remember the Wii U browser’s MP4 playback being surprisingly helpful. Running the `http-server` npm package, I was able to get video from my laptop to the TV in a pinch.

Adding in Handbrake, it wasn’t that bad of a setup!

I’ve seen bounties for re-adding C# to web exports to Godot 4. [1] It’s something that’s had some technical roadblocks for the engine’s developers, and looks like it might take a bit of time. [2]

There tend to be a lot of drive-by AI PRs attempt to “re-add” the feature, often not quite addressing the situation comprehensively. It seems like a bit of a local minima trap for the bots. [3]

[1] https://app.opire.dev/issues/01J8YJ06HPSY7ZAMAW08T83YBD

[2] https://godotengine.org/article/live-from-godotcon-boston-we...

[3] https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/119972

I don’t have diabetes, but I’ve heard from people with T1 that Welch’s work well for the reasons you mentioned.

When I browse the candy aisle at the store, I often wonder if certain treats tend to be better than others for administering glucose. In your experience, are there ever certain properties of candies that are more useful than others?

I’ve noticed something similar with vibecoded game rendering logic submitted by peers. Sometimes it will be peppered with extraneous checks for nullptr, or early returns on textures that have zero size.

I often wonder if it’s the statistical nature of the LLM mixed with a request in the prompt.

Please elaborate, poopmonster! What sort of skills are required to expertly use an LLM?

Yeah, I’m quite surprised at this comment. Commercial video games are mass-produced products, and as much as I dislike designers being bogged down in technical minutiae, having a sense of industrial design for the thing you’re making is an incredible boon.

Fumito Ueda was notably quite concerned with the technical/production feasibility of his designs for Shadow of the Colossus. [1] Doom was an exercise in both creativity and expertise.

[1] https://www.designroom.site/shadow-of-the-colossus-oral-hist...

I’ve been using COSMIC on a spare laptop, and enjoying it, but I’m stuck on 22.04 until their Iced rebase finishes and have IME working. [1]

Making a new DE plus compositor is a lot of work, but I do hope it works well for the Pop_OS developers.

[1] https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-epoch/issues/2174

Can you elaborate on what you mean by “organized criminals”? I hope you’re not poisoning the well!

I ask this as someone who has no love or support for the Liberals.

I’ve only seen that movie on an old MacBook about a decade ago, but I can certainly believe it’d be a treat seeing it the way you mention.

Funny enough, I want to see a version of Chungking Express that feels processed to look like an early-2000s digital camera.

My unfounded hunch for the computing bit is that home computers became more and more commonplace in the home as we approached the 21st century.

A Commodore 64 was a cool gadget, but “the family computer” became a device that commoditized the productivity. The opportunity cost of applying a computer to try something new went to near zero.

It might have been harder for someone to improve the productivity of an old factory in Shreveport, Louisiana with a computer than it was for the upstarts at id to make Doom.

Super Mario 64 is a video game that’s had a lot of rereleases, both official and unofficial. I sometimes wonder if the most people who have experienced it did in a way that wasn’t like the original Nintendo 64. The Switch version sold almost as many copies. As a kid, I beat it with arrow keys on an emulator in 2001.

When I read the responses to this document, I wonder if Dragon Ball is the same, where the collective nostalgia is actually quite diverse.