Specifically, Overload was made by Mike Kulas and Matt Toschlog, who were the original Descent developers. There were also major contributions from people like Dan Wentz (who worked on Descent 3) and from people who spent a lot of time playing the original game, like me and my wife (our 3 sons are all named for friends we know from Descent.)
That is true, furthermore Overload has an usermade campaign called Overload: First Strike, which is a conversion and upgrade of the entire Descent 1 campaign to Overload. Additionally I recommend Desecrators, which is a Descent-like with procedurally generated maps. Think Sublevel Zero or Everspace, except good.
Now all that's missing is a spiritual successor to Terminal Velocity. Or at least I think so. There's like a 10% chance that game was one of those games that was seriously held up by how much its soundtrack slapped.
I haven't played Terminal Velocity, but I finished the Descent Freespace game decades ago, and I am also itching for modernesque space-sims with 6-degrees-of-freedom dogfights, with some campaigns and explorations.
I liked this teaser trailer of Remnant Protocol, it seems exciting and perhaps a spiritual successor to Descent and Terminal Velocity games:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vemaUWPs6Zo
No Man's Sky was interesting, but its combat is meh, and it is a sandbox with procedurally generated planets made of limited types of biomes. It's inventory management is very clunky, so I finally gave up on it.
I tried Everspace, it is good, but it is more of a roguelite comprising only of dogfights in space. Haven't tried Everspace 2 yet, which I believe has campaign mode and is a better space sim.
I steered clear of Starfield, since Bethesda is infamous for launching buggy games. I will try it after a few years, once the modding community has overhauled it nicely.
I think we might have different risk/reward levels. For me, using VR can make me feel sick and vaguely disorientated for many hours afterwards. Almost nothing is worth that.
I love the idea of VR but my brain / balance system most certainly does not!
I'm a simple man, I see Descent, I make sure to mention Overload. Amazing game, likely the first game ever I got to the end just to see how the story ends (yes there is a story and it's pretty good).
I think the Revival studio didn't quite work out, I'm hoping the team is working on something else, they sure do know how to make good games.
To add, I also loved Fury 3 because it had outdoor environments - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmOtHKZHjxU - though Wikipedia tells me it's a rebrand of Terminal Velocity
I disagree, I think TUIs are a great fit in some problem domains.
Think for instance the Debian package configuration dialogs -- they're far more comfortable than the same questions without a TUI, and still work over a serial console if you have to use one.
For tools like various kinds of "top", there's many potential tools you can use to the same end and intentionally using one that draws CPU graphs over one that just displays a number. Graphs are much easier to interpret than a column of numbers.
In many cases they're the optimal choice given some constraint -- like the desire to have minimal dependencies, working over SSH, and being usable without breaking the flow. Yeah, you could make a tunnel to a tool that runs a local webserver and delivers graphs by HTTP, but the ergonomics of that are terrible.
Sure, I said I understand why people build them. I’ve used a lot of them. And yes with the tools we have you’re right, but I’m more lamenting the wonky, kind of archaic, unintegrated, only-semi-composable toolset that we have. No fundamental reason why you couldn’t deliver more structured UIs directly over SSH or a serial console, it’s just that in this timeline that didn’t happen yet (apart from X forwarding, which isn’t quite what I’m on about).
I found this which is by far the closet to what I’m on about. Imagine this but with inline UI controls too (keyboard-controllable, natch), probably based on Nushell (I like Nushell), and maybe an “alternate display mode” type thing for UIs that want to take over more and not act as a transcript. And, no offence, but more visually appealing and implemented with a common-denominator subset of native UI controls where possible. Clearly the issue is not building it, but adoption. I don’t have an answer for that.
The difference there, in Debian's case at least, is that there is a distinction between the frontend and the configuration backend; you're probably most familiar with the `newt` frontend, but there's also `text` (for textual entry without using curses or anything), `noninteractive` (for just use the defaults), gnome, kde, teletype, or even 'web' which does not seem to work effectively but is a neat idea regardless.
TUIs which are just TUI views of data you can get otherwise are fine; TUIs which are the only way to interact with something... less so.
I like TUIs, but if given the choice between a TUI or a CLI program, I'd take the latter. You can always create your own interface from it. Better if it's backed by a library.
FOSDEM is one of the largest Free and Open Source conferences, but I've found it a bit hard to talk about things like game and VR development on it due to the lack of fitting tracks. There's a Graphics track, but that tends towards the highly technical details of engine development.
So we've applied to run a Gaming and VR track this year and it actually happened! I think we got some amazing talks and excellent attendance.
The videos were just all released on the FOSDEM site.
I think for a first time everything went great, and we hope that we can do this again. Please use the Submit Feedback link at the bottom of the talk pages to make the next time even better.
Is there any TTS engine that doesn't need cloning and has some sort of parameters one can specify?
Like what if I want to graft on TTS to an existing text chat system and give each person an unique, randomly generated voice? Or want to try to get something that's not quite human, like some sort of alien or monster?
You could use an old-school formant synthesizer that lets you tune the parameters, like espeak or dectalk. espeak apparently has a klatt mode which might sound better than the default but i haven't tried it.
Whatever's possible, local on Linux. If it's not, one of my servers has a GPU that I pass through to a Windows VM, and run the games there and displayed by streaming. Also works for VR.
Not a setup for everyone and a tad technically complex to set up, but it works well enough for my needs.
It does run into some trouble with games that don't like virtual machines, but since I'm a very casual gamer I just play things that don't complain about that.
> Can someone be the Steam for Excel, please? :)
You can actually add anything you want to Steam, so you can use Steam Link to run Excel remotely.
Sleep just ceased to exist in the last few years and got replaced with an always on, low power mode.
I believe the reasoning was partly that suspend to RAM had serious reliability issues due to the complexity of saving the state, partly that people starting expecting cell phone-like performance where eg, mail is always received.
I think that makes sense and was in a way unavoidable.
Compare a physical shop with Spotify. A physical shop has limited space, so old stuff has to be pruned out to leave room for the new releases. So sales for old stuff gradually stop, and there's a small selection of current releases you can buy.
Spotify and the like aren't like that. It's an infinitely growing amount of music you can play. New releases may be completely unnoticed by users who follow recommendation algorithms. You can trivially follow impulses like "So what else did the the band that made Video Killed the Radio Star make?".
Since digital is infinitely reproducible and not perishable this will keep getting worse and worse. Any new artist competes against all of the music that was released before them.
I can generate images or get LLM answers in below 15 seconds on mundane hardware. The image generator draws many times faster than any normal person, and the LLM even on my consumer hardware still produces output faster than I can type (and I'm quite good at that), let alone think what to type.
Speed highly correlates with power efficiency. I believe my hardware maxes out somewhere around 150W. 15 seconds of that isn't much at all.
> Also, why are people moving mountains to make huge, power obliterating datacenters if actually "its fine, its not that much"?
I presume that's mostly training, not inference. But in general anything that serves millions of requests in a small footprint is going to look pretty big.
It's not a good analogy at all, because of what they said about mundane hardware. They're specifically not talking about any kind of ridiculous wattage situation, they're talking about single GPUs that need fewer watts than a human in an office to make text faster than a human, or that need 2-10x the watts to make video a thousand times faster.
An LLM gives AN answer. If you ask for not many more than that it gets confused, but instead of acting in a human-like way, it confidently proceeds forward with incorrect answers. You never quite know when the context got poisoned, but reliability drops to 0.
There's many things to say on this. Free is worthless. Speed is not necessarily a good thing. The image generation is drivel. But...
The main nail in the coffin is accountability. I can't trust my work if I can't trust the output of the machine. (and as a bonus, the machine can't build a house. It's single purpose).
I think you still should be able to expect a bit of accommodation on trains that cross country borders or go to airports.
The EU makes travel between EU countries as easy as travel between US states. You can just get on a train from Germany to Spain without any prior planning.
It's also unusual given how much English you'll hear in Germany nowadays (at least in major, tourist-attracting cities) in just about any other context.
English has been in a hegemonic position over German for the past sixty years, not vice versa.
The majority of popular German language films tend to have English language titles when aimed at the English market, and nearly always when aimed at children: "Goodbye Lenin", "Run Lola Run" etc. I was pretty amazed at "Ice Age", because it would be easy and concise to translate.
The way I see it, when LLMs work, they're almost magical. When they don't, oh well, it didn't take that long anyway, and I didn't have them until recently, so I can just do things the old boring way if the magic fails.
The problem with zork is that you don’t have a list of all the options in front of you so you have to guess. You could have a menu that lists all the valid options, but that changes the game. It doesn’t require you to use imagination and open-ended thinking, it becomes more of a point’n’click storybook.
But for tools, we should have a clear up front list of capabilities and menu options. Photoshop and VScode give you menu after menu of options with explicit well defined behaviors because they are tools used to achieve a specific aim and not toys for open ended exploration.
An llm doesn’t give you a menu because the llm doesn’t even know what it’s capable of. And that’s why I think we can see such polarized responses - some people want an LLM that’s a supercharged version of a tool, others want a toy for exploration.
The only time it ever seems like magic is when you don't really care about the problem or how it gets "solved" and are willing to ignore all the little things it got wrong.
Generative AI is neither magic, nor does it really solve any problems. The illusion of productivity is all in your head.
For my uses, my rule is "long to research, but easy to verify". I only ask for things I can quickly determine if they're right or not, I just don't want to spend half an hour googling and sorting though the data.
For most of my queries there's an acceptable margin of error, which is generally unavoidable AI or not. Google isn't guaranteed to return everything you might want either.
And I believe made by some of the people that formerly worked on Descent.