I have a mental hangup with the very real dread of when hosted multiplayer games die, that all the time and effort I have spent, and all the things I’ve built, will just suddenly disappear. It’s why I run a private G17 Mabinogi server on my pc, rather than playing online.
Saw this trailer the other day that might interest you, it’s an offline type mmo where all the other players are simulated. Erenshor Offline MMO Trailer
I’ve always thought it was weird that there hasn’t been a Hunger Games video game. Not to play out the teen movie storyline, but as the Battle Royale part.
Imagine creating a character using typical RPG elements (strength, endurance, speed, crafting, survival, etc.) with a limited number of points, the same number of points as everyone else. Then you’re placed inside different large arenas that have environmental hazards for a Battle Royale survival that could last up to 30 minutes per game if you’re good enough to make it to the end.
You have to survive against random encounters just like the gamemasters use in the books, dangerous animals, and you can get sponsorship drops like the COD kill streak rewards (healing items, tools, weapons). You could even make it through by not killing anyone if you’re good enough at surviving the environment, but you’d better hope you don’t end up in a fight.
It’s not a dedicated game and idk if servers even run these anymore, but the original popular “battle royal” was minecraft hunger games servers and they did kinda run like that - no stats obviously, but throwing you empty into a bounded world where you’d have to survive and craft and kill monsters and each other. I think some of them might’ve even had like your sponsor drops where you’d get potions or enchanted stuff
A turn-based, tactical, squad-centered action title where a collective of vicious aliens invade the planet and you as the leader of a group of brave if vulnerable heroes have to save the world from the strange new threat. Except this time the world the aliens have picked to invade is a fantasy realm.
Guiding mages, warriors and rogues against the threat from outer space, combining XCOMesque battles with traditional fantasy game combat and levelling mechanics. Advance through the map taking regions back in control rather than zigzagging around the globe. Both the dwarven and elven capitals are under attack, which one do you go to rescue first and gain the help a new race to pick your pool of heroes from? Manage your kingdom and choose which deities you build a temple for, determining whether you unlock paladins or warlocks as a sub-class. Beat the aliens to reach the dragon before its captured and converted to their side. And as you encounter more armoured enemies, let your blacksmiths experiment with slapping together scavenged items from the battlefield to form high -tier magitech armour of your own.
It’s a fever dream combination of effectively XCOM and Majesty that’s been in my head for years because I love quirky mashups like this. Not necessarily anything new under the sun but I feel like with some work put into it, you could really forge something unique by embracing the combination of styles and genre conventions.
They are for providing special hardware for Neural Network inference (most likely convolutional). Meaning they provide a bunch of matrix multiplication capabilities and other operations that are required for executing a neural network.
They can be leveraged for generative AI needs. And I bet that’s how Nvidia provides the feature of automatic upscaling - it’s not the game that does it, it’s literally the graphic cards that does it. Leveraging AI of video games (like using the core to generate text like ChatGPT) is another matter - you want to have a game that works on all platforms even those that do not have such cores. Having code that says “if it has such cores execute that code on them. Otherwise execute it on CPU” is possible but imo that is more the domain of the computational libraries or the game engine - not the game developer (unless that developer develops its own engine)
But my point is that it’s not as simple as “just have each core implement an AI for my game”. These cores are just accelerators of matrix multiplication operations. Which are themselves used in generative AI. They need to be leveraged within the game dev software ecosystem before the game dev can use those features.
it’s not the game that does it, it’s literally the graphic cards that does it The game is just software. It will execute on the GPU and CPU. DLSS (proprietary) and XeSS (OSS) are both libraries to run the AI bits of the cards for upscaling, because they weren’t really being used for anything. Gamedevs have the skills to use them just like regular AI devs do.
By AI here I mean what is traditionally meant by “game AI”, pathfinding, decisionmaking, co-ordination, etc. There is a counterstrike bot which uses neural nets (CPU), and it’s been around for decades now. It is trained like normal bots are trained. You can train an AI in a game and then have the AI as NPCs, enemies, etc.
what is the benefit over just using classical algorithms
Utilisation. A CPU isn’t really built for deep AI code, so it can’t really do realistic AI given the frame budget of doing other things. This is famously why games have bad AI. Training AI via AI algorithms could make the NPCs more realistic or smarter, and you could do this within reasonable frame budgets.
I see. You want to offload AI-specific computations to the Nvidia AI cores. Not a bad idea, although it does mean that hardware that do not have them will have more CPU load so perhaps the AI will have to be tuned down based on the hardware they run on…
No, I don’t think that the levels become harder. They also gift so many free boosters to the players that it is way easier than 10 years ago when I first played the game.
I also feel like that after failing a level too often, that the game is cheating for you so that you don’t lose interest.
The game is “cheating” all the time. All the successful games with thousands of repetitive levels, go whale fishing and have engagement promoting strategies.
The general strategy is:
Introduce core mechanics “organically” over the first few levels, then keep a periodic “loading screen tip” reminder
Add a harder level every several easier ones
Introduce “boosters” with a few free ones
Dis-associate booster cost from real money cost by having an “in-game currency” (not actual currency) with some non-intuitive conversion ratios
Add a second kind of free-ish in-game currency to keep players used to making in-game purchases
If a player runs out of boosters, give them some free ones after a while
Improve user engagement with regular reminders and periodic offers
Promote FOMO with limited-time offers
Add mechanics with obvious MiniMax-ing strategies, that are however impossible for a person with a normal life to MiniMax, while offering a way to use in-game currencies to correct for that
Keep adding cosmetic changes
Introduce slightly new mechanics once in a while every a lot of levels, combine mechanics together if you’ve run out of ideas
For each level, have a predefined setup that makes it extremely easy to solve, along with normal generators that make them hard to solve
Use the easy setups to showcase new mechanics and boosters
Use the hard setups to make people want to spend boosters, and buy them, and use real money to purchase in-game currency to do that
Ideally, have a level generator with tunable difficulty that can be adapted for every user
Offer whales big spenders exclusive VIP levels, that require a lot of spending to win
Add one or more “leaderboards” for big spenders to showcase how much they spend good they are
Remove real world time clues for big spenders, don’t let them realize for how many hours they’ve been throwing their money away
If a big spender drops their spending or engagement level, shower them with offers, assign a personal manager, offer invitations to real world events… whatever it takes (up to a certain % of their expected monthly spending)
Periodically expand the game with hundreds and thousands of “new” levels… which follow the same rules
Bonus points if you add “seasons” and a “season pass”.
Extra bonus if you place and cross-promote a number of games with the same strategy but different cosmetic themes.
Casino mode: have thousands of “games” all in one, with different cosmetics, complex winning modes, and very simple mechanics (press button to spin, press button to auto-spin 1000 times, etc)… but in most jurisdictions you need to calculate and disclose the exact odds of winning in each mode for every level generator.
Back in the day I playtested this game concept under an NDA, but since it expired I can talk about it.
An FPS game in an open map with buildings, has 12 players playing but when someone dies, they respawn right there but swap to the opposite team. The last person to get shot gets eliminated and then the teams split again. This goes on until 6 players are remaining, who are declared the winning team.
You could mitigate that by coms only being proximity and no indication of how many players each team has. Thst would also make offensive playstyles preferable.
My new pet theory is that CS:2 came out so that Valve had all their IP sitting at 2. So then at some point, when their audience is too old to play games anymore, and the youth don’t even know that Valve ever made games, they’ll release a 3-box with HL3, Portal 3, LFD 3, CS:3, TF3, and DOTA 3.
So, while INFRA already does fully exist, I’d love to see more games like it. It’s really hard to describe what INFRA is without major spoilers, but if you’ve played it then you probably know what I’m talking about.
It’s like… take the new Chernobyl game and remove literally all the death states, then fill it to the brim with easter eggs, lore content, secret rooms and pathways, challenging logic puzzles, stuff like that. INFRA ticked all those boxes for me and I have yet to find a game like it.
Every game that I’ve looked at and been recommended as being “like INFRA” always has some major flaw or some concession that really sets it apart from the original game. INFRA is pretty much all about exploring your surroundings to uncover the plot of the game and even change some of the story if you’re vigilant enough about the puzzles. You can literally complete the game just as a walking sim while doing fuck-all, but I think most players will find the intrigue of the story interesting enough to be almost coerced into going down the other fork in the road, so to speak. Like there are sections in every chapter where you have to use your knowledge in civil engineering to repair some sort of machinery using intermediate logic puzzles, but you’re always able to just skip it. However, completing these puzzles allows you to unlock the story as the puzzles require exploration. Hope that made sense.
I wasn’t expecting to see INFRA mentioned but it’s one of my favorite games for a lot of the reasons you mentioned! It really had a sense for exploration and environments to tell more of the story. And it really is part puzzle game without having any single gimmick like other first person games. It reminds me a lot of Half Life 2’s puzzles (which makes sense since INFRA was also built in Source as far as I can remember).
I’m really itching for more expansions or games like it. Not sure what happened to the DLC they were working on, but there were some groups working on mods.
A true modern successor to The Guild (aka Europa 1400). That concept has soooo much potential imo, but the games after the first were notoriously underfunded, half-baked and riddled with bugs!
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