Post by @icculus@mastodon.gamedev.place

@icculus@mastodon.gamedev.place yesterday

Look, I'm willing to say this is impressive, but it's also terrifying:

https://jeromem.dev/Experiments/Deus+Ex+in+the+Browser

I'm over here lovingly hand-crafting (what I think is) a useful piece of system software right now, a few thousand lines of code, and a few weeks' work to build it.

Meanwhile, this AI thing reverse-engineered all of Unreal Engine 1 from the retail binaries over that same time frame.

I'm just trying not to feel an enormous amount of existential dread right now. Maybe that's dumb of me, I dunno.

./jerome{m}

Deus Ex in the Browser — Rebuilding Unreal Engine 1 from the Original Bits

The original 2000 Deus Ex running in a browser tab: a JavaScript package reader, a Rust interpreter compiled to WebAssembly, three.js on WebGL2, and the game's own DLLs as the oracle.

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Wolf480pl

@wolf480pl@mstdn.io yesterday

@icculus for me, the most beautiful thing about software are the moments when by reading code I learn something about the author.

Whether it's a beautifully simple solution to a complex problem, a very wise handling of a hard-to-anticipate edge case, an ugly hack, or a frustrating compromise - it tells a story of a human who cared.

And IMO that's worth more than a mountain of code nobody has looked at.

7666

@7666@comp.lain.la yesterday

@icculus it still baffles me that people will put all this effort into orchestration and project managing agents and building testing systems to validate output and mitigate LLM shortcomings, and yet still not just write up the actual article showcasing the work themselves. I read claudish and want to vomit.

Blurry Moon

@sun@shitposter.world yesterday

@7666 people wouldn't improve their process to help other people but ironically now they are improving their process to make it easier to automate, probably something to learn about people in there.

Blurry Moon

@sun@shitposter.world yesterday

@7666 just dumping my opinion, totally agree reading LLM writing is gross. I've done it and I'm ashamed

Torbjörn Norinder

@tnorinder@mastodon.gamedev.place yesterday

@icculus was reverse engineering a game on and off for the past few years. Not sure I’ll keep going, since there’s already a (slop, depending on your definition) port. Was thinking I’d still do it for fun, but feel kind of ambivalent about that now.

Ryan C. Gordon

@icculus@mastodon.gamedev.place yesterday

@tnorinder don’t give up on things because of this. Building something you intensely like matters more than the final result, or anyone/anything else’s output.

8Bit | :linux: :godot: :gog: :switch:

@memoriesin8bit@mastodon.gamedev.place yesterday

@icculus You made SDL.
And so many games and other applications make use of it because it is so genuinely powerful. To me, that is much, much more impressive. And I am not ready to believe that I am the only one who thinks that way.

Xer Shadow Tail ☄️🌺🏳️‍⚧️

@XerShadowTail@chitter.xyz yesterday

@icculus Deus Ex has been done before though and Unreal Engine 1 has been decompiled/reverse engineered since long before, it is just recycling that. Not to mention that Unreal Engine 1's source has been leaked so many times.

mcc

@mcc@mastodon.social yesterday

@icculus If a reply is welcome

What I honestly think has changed

Is that doing things "because it's impressive" is over. "I got X technology working on Y old system!" and everyone's impressed by your programming chops. No longer a point. Impressing people can be automated.

So what matters to me now

Is making things, that the people I care about, will benefit from, and enjoy

And the people I care about most

Are the people who don't want to use software/play games written by LLMs

Ryan C. Gordon

@icculus@mastodon.gamedev.place 12 hr. ago

@mcc (even discounting that a reply is _always_ welcome from you, this meant a lot to me. Thank you.)

Amini Allight

@AminiAllight@mastodon.gamedev.place yesterday

@mcc @icculus This is exactly what's so self-defeating about all of it. The same thing that makes doing these tasks easier also destroys much of the reason people were doing them in the first place

Ketavera

@Ketavera@infosec.exchange 23 hr. ago

@AminiAllight @mcc @icculus I think that the goal of simply making software so that it is cool, cheap / free, beneficial to people, improving something, etc. still does exist.

That has a personal and social value I think. At the same time it surly is demotivating knowing that maybe in 6 months ai can one shot prompt this thing etc.

mcc

@mcc@mastodon.social 21 hr. ago

@Ketavera @AminiAllight @icculus "knowing that maybe in 6 months ai can one shot prompt this thing etc."

I mean sure it wouldn't surprise me if AI can one shot the thing once it's been trained on your code lol

PsySal

@PsySal@mastodon.social yesterday

@mcc @icculus LLM use has the effect that people power trip. They lose humility and empathy because it creates the illusion that they can do anything or everything all on their own

TTimo

@TTimo@mastodon.social yesterday

@mcc @icculus that's a pretty sound logic.

mcc

@mcc@mastodon.social yesterday

@icculus the world is going to be smaller in the future and so what i care about is that the smaller world is allowed to exist and that is a good one

Leandro (Cerberus1746)

@cerberus1746@mastodon.gamedev.place yesterday

@mcc @icculus At absolutely worse, I think not using AI is will be a marketing strategy for a "niche" or a artstyle, like choosing traditional art over non ai digital art.

Daniel Gibson

@Doomed_Daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place yesterday

@icculus
I doubt that the code the LLM threw up is as maintainable as yours.

Ryan C. Gordon

@icculus@mastodon.gamedev.place yesterday

@Doomed_Daniel yes, and it probably doesn’t matter for this specific task (what is messier than a prebuilt Win32 DLL, right?).

BUT: I _have_ noticed that projects like this are extremely focused on various metrics of _correctness_, and I feel like that’s because they can’t offer _quality_.