Alas, Planets.nu has no source code available. That's OK if you just want to play, but I really always wanted to make some changes, and to self-host (like you kinda could in the original vga planets)
The UI and server are relatively simple though, so it should be a fun exercise to vibe-code a clone based on phost and openplanets.
> Fwiw nothing beats ‘implement the game logic in full (huge amounts of work) and with pruning on some heuristics look 50 moves ahead’. This is how chess engines work and how all good turn based game ai works.
For board games this is mostly true. For turn based games in general, it is not. It's certainly not true to say "all good turn based game ai" works like this.
Turn based games where multiple "moves" are allowed per turn can very quickly have far too many branches to look ahead more than a very small number of turns. On board games you might have something like Warhammer, or Blood Bowl where there are many possible actions and order of actions within a turn matters.
For computer games you may Screeps [2] or the Lux multi-agent AI competitions [3] which both have multiple "units" per player, where each unit may have multiple possible actions. You can easily reach a combinatorial explosion where any attempt at modeling future states of the world fails and you have to fall back on pure heuristics.
The person who wrote the post says that they can produce the same quality content in "2-3 days" instead of "several weeks", and that there are two people working in essentially the same position.
If the amount of content to be produced remains constant, then from a purely financial point of view the company should be looking at cutting one of them. AI would have then taken their job.
For the amount of content to be produced to not remain constant either the studio would have to go for increased art quality, or scale up the rest of the business to keep up with the new art productivity. It's not clear they'd make that decision over cutting their art department spending in two. At the very least their job is at risk.
Oof. Firing isn't free, comrade. Reducing redundancy to a single point of failure has two major effects: the latency penalty becomes quadratic as workload scales, and if any person quits, you lose the whole team.
In general, creative roles like artists are the sum value of their education and experience, not just their measured output. If you don't possess art history vocabulary, you're going to be very limited in prompting or designing more advanced embeddings and LoRA or training models. I'm seeing this a lot right now - people don't want to share their prompts because they don't want everyone to know how much the model carried them and how little any actual "prompt engineering" went into it.
The smart thing for their boss to do would be to scale projects and have one of them focus on managing and filtering the new volume of assets. Since it sounds like they like working from scratch, even adding external time to "research tooling and methods" would probably keep them happy until they find the challenge in their new duties.
> people don't want to share their prompts because they don't want everyone to know how much the model carried them and how little any actual "prompt engineering" went into it.
Right. Because this whole "prompt engineering" is just another job title, not an applied science, and then again, prompts can and will be automated away.
The majority of managers would jump at the opportunity to reduce their number of direct reports? Owners might want to cut salaries but managers want to increase direct reports.
If I understand you correctly, this doesn't work because ChatGPT isn't the only language model in the world. It's only the most popular at this point in time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VGA_Planets