The game doesn’t go on sale very often because it’s very fairly priced at $35 and I’ve gotten each DLC the day of release so idk how they do bundles. It may be a long wait if you’re hoping for a deep sale as I’ve never seen it drop more than 25% below retail price.
You get a lot of the core experience from the base game+mods. So don’t feel like you need to get DLC to start because there’s a learning curve on the game anyway. The community endearingly calls your first 1000 hours in the game “the tutorial.”
I’m 1800hrs in (with probably another couple hundred making mods), Rimworld is pure crack in all the best ways possible. Hands down the best $30 I’ve ever spent on a game.
Everyone plays a bit different, personally I’d recommend playing the vanilla game for a bit and using mods to flesh things out or iron out any rough edges in how you experience the game. The modding scene for the game is absolutely phenomenal, if at any point you’re going “gee, there’s got to be a better way to do X, deal with Y, or add more Z”, there’s probably a mod that does it, for example I like designing my colony fairly early on (so I have something to build towards), but since the existing mono-color plan gets confusing pretty fast (what was wall and what was workbench, tool cabinet, light, etc), I find More Planning to be a bit of a must have. As a blanket statement, the Vanilla Expanded mods are very well done and integrate neatly into the game (that said, they aren’t necessary meant to all be run at once, so you can pick and choose what you want and go from there).
I have a pretty decent list going, but if we’re just talking a short list of personal favorites, I really love Megafauna, Frozen Snow Fox’s Bionics, and Cyber Fauna. (Oh and a shameless self-plug for my own mods)
Enh, I’m not so sure about that, one of the most unique parts of RimWorld is that the primary goal is to tell a story. Even the best stories need a bit breathing room for the action-y bits to have weigh. RimWorld is filled with stories about colonies that ran out of food in the dead of winter, lone survivor types that either bleed out or later died of infection after a freak hunting mishap, or trying to hide from the flames and wait out the raiders/ murder machines. It may be waiting, but I find that more often than not (especially in the early game), it’s either a welcome break after a hectic day or an edge-of-your-seat fight-for-survival kind of waiting.
Grim Dawn is so good. If you have any interest, just go for it. I don’t even play many games like that, and I’ve put tonsss of hours into it now. Super underrated soundtrack too, imo.
The multiplayer is full of ultra skilled people who have played for years, so a steep curve. Best FPS campaign ever though, so I recommend it for that.
I have found that some games like this, sometimes I do really well if only because there is such an established way to do things well that my flailing about catches people off guard. Sometimes not following meta is a shock to expectations. I’ll win by sheer incompetence.
Not on steam deck but I play it on Linux pc and ps5. One of the coolest things about it is cross save, you can save your game on pc or ps5 then continue from that same spot on the other platform.
Some things are a bit small and apart from cutscene camera angles or really zoomed in there isn’t much detail visible on the characters. I played with kb/m inputs mapped to have better utilization of deck controls. Some low fps bits here and there but generally great.
Definitely a great game. Recently had a pretty big update adding enemies and combat that has been fun so far but you can also just disable combat mode for a chill time building your swarms/spheres
Anyone got recommendations for cheap or interesting indie games this sale?
I bought Touhou Artificial Dreams In Arcadia during the October sale and it is a bit of a hidden gem for fans of the old SMT JRPG games on SNES. I also picked up Lunacid but have not got that far in it, but it seems like a strong revival of the classic Kings Field games.
Recursed, just £1.67. It is a brilliant puzzle game, completely mind bending stuff about recursion and jumping into chests inside of chests while taking another chest with you so you can jump inside it…
Wonderputt Forever - £2.20. Prettiest minigolf game, animated to excess. Less than an hour to beat unless you go for optional challenges. You may have played the original flash game a decade ago.
Maybe this will be the actual sale I pull the trigger on Sonic Frontiers I said I wasn’t going to spend any money on games for a while but I really sonic and they seemed to have nailed this one.
I picked up GTA 4 , I was going to get rdr2 cyberpunk , hogwarts and sifu if they had hit the right price but I’ll leave it for a future sale. I picked up the mass effect trilogy earlier this year for 9.99 now its cheaper. I also picked up a humble spaced out bundle too recently so I have tons to keep me busy.
Pretty cool. I almost had to start liking Epic Store for not having such a dumb stance. The disclaimer on games using generative content is weird, but it’s a solid step forward.
AI generated content has a lot of unanswered legal questions around it which can lead to a lot of headache with moderation and possibility of illegal content showing up (remember that not only “well meaning” devs will use these tools). It’s seems reasonable for a company to try minimize the risk.
As for disclaimer, it will allow people make an informed decision - not sure what’s wrong with that.
AI generated content has a lot of unanswered legal questions around it which can lead to a lot of headache with moderation and possibility of illegal content showing up (remember that not only “well meaning” devs will use these tools). It’s seems reasonable for a company to try minimize the risk.
There were never any unanswered legal questions would prevent you from being able to use generated assets in a game. That’s why Valve’s old stance was so odd. I’m not sure what you mean by the possibility for illegal content, can you elaborate?
I’d like to mention that I’m not exactly up to date with AI related legislation so treat what I’m about to write as a genuine attempt to understand their worries rather than trying to be smart.
I remember there being a lot of uncertainty about the legality of what and how can('t) be used in training models (especially when used for commercial purposes) - has that been settled in any way? I think there was also a case of not being able to copyright AI generated content due to lack of human authorship (I’d have to look for an article on this one as it’s been a while) - this obviously won’t be a problem if generated assets are used as a base to be worked upon.
As for illegal content - Valve mentioned it in regards to live-generated stuff. I assume they’re worried about possibility of plagiarism and things going against their ToS, which is why they ask about guardrails used in such systems. On a more general note, there were also cases of AI articles coming up with fake stories with accusations of criminal behavior involving real people - this probably won’t be a problem with AI usage in games (I hope anyway) but it’s another sensitive topic devs using such tools have to keep in mind.
Again, I’m nowhere near knowledgeable enough to write this stuff from a position of confidence so feel free to correct me if any of this has been dealt with.
I remember there being a lot of uncertainty about the legality of what and how can('t) be used in training models (especially when used for commercial purposes) - has that been settled in any way? I think there was also a case of not being able to copyright AI generated content due to lack of human authorship (I’d have to look for an article on this one as it’s been a while) - this obviously won’t be a problem if generated assets are used as a base to be worked upon.
In the United States, the Authors Guild v. Google case established that Google’s use of copyrighted material in its books search constituted fair use. Most people agree this will apply to generative models as well since the nature of the use is highly transformative.
I recommend reading this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF from April last year if you haven’t already. The EFF is a digital rights group who recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone.
Works involving the use of AI are copyrightable, but just like everything else, it depends. It’s also important to remember the Copyright Office guidance isn’t law. Their guidance reflects only the office’s interpretation based on its experience, it isn’t binding in the courts or other parties. Guidance from the office is not a substitute for legal advice, and it does not create any rights or obligations for anyone. They are the lowest rung on the ladder for deciding what law means.
As for illegal content - Valve mentioned it in regards to live-generated stuff. I assume they’re worried about possibility of plagiarism and things going against their ToS, which is why they ask about guardrails used in such systems. On a more general note, there were also cases of AI articles coming up with fake stories with accusations of criminal behavior involving real people - this probably won’t be a problem with AI usage in games (I hope anyway) but it’s another sensitive topic devs using such tools have to keep in mind.
I agree live generated stuff could get developers in trouble. With pre-generated assets you can make sure ahead of time everything is above board, but that’s not really possible when you have users influencing what content appears in your game. If they were going to ban anything, the original ban should have been limited to just this.
Thanks for the links, that’s exactly why I wasn’t sure where things stand currently. While I am familiar with EFF, I wasn’t aware of that article so it was an interesting read.
The one I kind of remembered (even though only partially) was the Reuters article, which contains this quote I was referring to:
The office reiterated Wednesday that copyright protection depends on the amount of human creativity involved, and that the most popular AI systems likely do not create copyrightable work.
It’s obviously a bit more complicated than how I mentioned it initially so I’m glad I could read it again.
The original ban was always meant to be temporary as far as I understand, Valve simply wanted some time to decide rather than make a rash decision (it’s easier to open the floodgates than it is to clean up after the fact). I’m sure things will change in the future as AI tools become more and more common anyway.
The one I kind of remembered (even though only partially) was the Reuters article, which contains this quote I was referring to:
The office reiterated Wednesday that copyright protection depends on the amount of human creativity involved, and that the most popular AI systems likely do not create copyrightable work.
This was likely in reference to Midjourney, which was the system in question in its ruling. Midjourney, even for its time had very rudimentary user controls way behind the open standards that likely didn’t impress the registrar.
There’s also a spectrum of involvement depending on what tool you’re using. I know with web based interfaces don’t allow for a lot of freedom due to wanting to keep users from generating things outside their terms of use, but with open source models based on Stable Diffusion you can get a lot more involved and get a lot more freedom. We’re in a completely different world from March 2023 as far as generative tools go.
Take a look at the difference between a Midjourney prompt and a Stable Diffusion prompt.
To break down a bit of what’s going on here, I’d like to explain some of the elements found here.
sarasf is the token for the LoRA of the character in this image, and <lora:sarasf_V2-10:0.7> is the character LoRA for Sarah from Shining Force II. LoRA are like supplementary models you use on top of a base model to capture a style or concept, like a patch. Some LoRA don’t have activation tokens, and some with them can be used without their token to get different results.
The .07 in <lora:sarasf_V2-10:0.7> refers to the strength at which the weights from the LoRA are applied to the output. Lowering the number causes the concept to manifest weaker in the output. You can blend styles this way with just the base model or multiple LoRA at the same time at different strengths. You can even take a monochrome LoRA and take the weight into the negative to get some crazy colors.
The Negative Prompt is where you include things you don’t want in your image. (worst quality, low quality:1.4), here have their attention set to 1.4, attention is sort of like weight, but for tokens. LoRA bring their own weights to add onto the model, whereas attention on tokens works completely inside the weights they’re given. In this negative prompt FastNegativeV2 is an embedding known as a Textual Inversion. It’s sort of like a crystallized collection of tokens that tell the model something precise you want without having to enter the tokens yourself or mess around with the attention manually. Embeddings you put in the negative prompt are known as Negative Embeddings.
In the next part, Steps stands for how many steps you want the model to take to solve the starting noise into an image. More steps take longer.
VAE is the name of the Variational Autoencoder used in this generation. The VAE is responsible for working with the weights to make each image unique. A mismatch of VAE and model can yield blurry and desaturated images, so some models opt to have their VAE baked in,
Size is the dimensions in pixels the image will be generated at.
Seed is the number representation of the starting noise for the image. You need this to be able to reproduce a specific image.
Model is the name of the model used, and Sampler is the name of the algorithm that solves the noise into an image. There are a few different samplers, each with their own trade-offs for speed, quality, and memory usage.
CFG is basically how close you want the model to follow your prompt. Some models can’t handle high CFG values and flip out, giving over-exposed or nonsense output.
Hires steps represents the amount of steps you want to take on the second pass to upscale the output. This is necessary to get higher resolution images without visual artifacts. Hires upscaler is the name of the model that was used during the upscaling step, and again there are a ton of those with their own trade-offs and use cases.
After ADetailer are the parameters for Adetailer, an extension that does a post-process pass to fix things like broken anatomy, faces, and hands. We’ll just leave it at that because I don’t feel like explaining all the different settings found there.
"This will enable us to release the vast majority of games that use it. "
So it sounds like the floodgates are opening and now it’ll be up to the users to sort out the flood of BS. None of this is truly surprising, while I’m not cynical enough to suggest their temporary stance was a quick way to score some easy points with the anti-AI crowd, we all kind of have to acknowledge that this technology is coming and Steam is too big to be left behind by it. It stands to reason.
I also understand the reasoning for splitting pre/live-generated AI content, but it’s all going to go in the same dumpster for me regardless.
I certainly think it’s possible to use pre-generated AI content in an ethical and reasonable way when you’re committed to having it reach a strong enough stylistic and artistic vision with editors and artists doing sufficient passes over it. The thing is, the people already developing in that way would continue to do so because of their own standards, they won’t be affected by this decision. The people wanting to use generative AI to pump out quick cash grabs are the ones that will latch onto it, I can’t think of any other base this really appeals to.
steamcommunity.com
Najstarsze