It’s not a matter of continental purity, I would have no issues with ML services from any democratic-leaning country as long as they have the capability to choose an independent path that’s not subject to American/Chinese pressure.

I will also note that it was Brussee himself that pitched the notion of an European game engine. The concept doesn’t really work if you are using American services (Anthropic or OpenAI) for core elements of your game engine architecture.

Reliance on OpenAI/Palantir/Anthropic in the ML space is asking for trouble as you give the Americans your data and you open yourself up to blackmail, threats and extortion.

I also wouldn’t hope for any fundamental change in attitudes towards things like crime, corruption among the leadership elements of American society in the next 20-30 years. For better or for worse, the median American is too well off to have any incentive to put pressure on their leadership to address crime. And when they start wondering

I would love to be completely wrong on all of this, but I am afraid it’s a bit too naive and careless to just assume all problems will magically disappear just like that.

I am sure you didn’t mean it in a bad way, but usage for the military is not necessarily a bad thing. It all depends on your real life situation.

I live in Ukraine and I would only be happy for ML tech to help save Ukrainian lives (both military and civilian), increase the efficiency of killing of russian invaders (on an absolute and cost basis) and enable more efficient strikes on military facilities and oil infrastructure in the imperial core of russia.

If it’s based on LLMs from Anthropic or OpenAI, it’s still dependent on Americans.

Le Chat/Mistral seems to have improved quiet a bit for my LLM use cases since I last tried it, but I have no clue how well their services work for game development use cases.

I would argue a European alternative needs to have something different to beat the American oligarchic “freedom polemics in the front, corruption and crime in the back” model. Open source seems like the best way to develop services that can resist corruption and focus on making a good product. This doesn’t seem to be open source, would be interesting to hear what their USP is beyond alignment with EU regulations and deep integration with ML tech (that is still dependent on US service providers).

It’s interesting how it seems indie games releases with a similar genre/concept always come out around the same time, in clusters.

Yes, there was definitely an Unreal Tournament map built around the cannon.

I was even curious and it turns out it was an Assault map called Overlord for UT99 based on the WW2 operation.

https://unreal.fandom.com/wiki/AS-Overlord

There might have been another one.

Although you definitely don’t get to manage them on a day to day basis in UT99.

Interesting concept, I am surprised something similar have never been done before. That being said, it’s possible that someone made a more primitive version of this gameplay concept on newgrounds and it just never got big.

Timberborn is a lot of fun, you can build some crazy worlds when you reach the end game.

This is unfortunately a common issue with relatively complex strategy games.

Most of the time you have to learn by doing either some bigger easier being addressed via web search.

It’s modern reincarnation of MicroProse from the 80s/90s.

They are pretty indie focused if you look at the games they publish.

Sounds very manageable! Cheers!

How is the combat? Are their playstyles that allow you to minimize the combat? This is something that wasn’t clear to me from the reviews I read.

I love the concept and the management elements sound like a lot of fun, but I am curious about the how the mech combat jives with the other strategy gameplay elements.

Oh OK! Yeah, local network is a whole different experience because you have a great degree of control.

Our internet infrastructure is probably in some ways better [*] than the US or Canada, based on my experiences living and travelling in North America, but it seems if you have WiFi involved anywhere in the chain, it’s difficult to get a good experience.

• In the sense of a near universal median experience, we don’t have the high end stuff, the Verizon telecom service in some rural areas is impressive, but I will speculate the majority of households can get gigabit fiber for $15/month and mobile access is universal, cheap and competitive (but we don’t have 5G).

I tried that when I was in another city for a few months. It was all right, but I was on WiFi 5/AC and I live in a country where buildings have thick walls and sometimes there would be issues with streaming, even though I had gigabit on both sides and my desktop was/is on ethernet.

And I play strategy games, which from my understanding are a better fit for streaming than most single player genres.

I found myself playing older indie games that I missed (actually found a lot of cool stuff).

I spent my childhood with a desktop (mid 90s to mid 2000s) then I had gaming notebooks until 2018 or so, except for a 3 year period in beginning of the 2010s.

A gaming laptop (or even a mid-weight laptop with an eGPU) is always a compromise (in both directions).

A “gaming desktop” can generally do so much more than just gaming. I did video editing and encoding on my gaming laptop, you can make it work, it’s slow and the heat noise can get annoying (versus a desktop that’s possible to make quite even under load).

And with some ML video stuff like Topaz Video (*) even a powerful desktop can struggle, I can’t image using Topaz video on any laptop. Especially any tasks with 4K using complex algorithms beat my poor desktop to pulp (5800X, 3080, 64 GB, not the latest and greatest, but no slouch).

(*) I’ve successfully upscaled older video footage (586x320) from mid the 2000 by 4x along with X4 frame interpolation without it looking overly fake and being pretty decent quality. You can even do complex scenes like public events as long as you have source 720p footage. It’s like magic.

Also large storage is a pain with laptops. You really need a fast SSD with at least 2TB (it’s also good to have a secondary SSD) and another 10 TB+ HDD storage. This type of setup is difficult with a laptop.

For a second I thought this was Postal 2 Community Edition.

I actually tried to do this in the OG GoldSource, but I could never get them to move to the next map. This was on the early maps (office complex), I was too busy trying to stay alive in the later maps.

Why can’t they get a Steam/GOG/Windows Store Key for the games from the Luna store which will sunsetted? That seems like the reasons way forward if they don’t want to run the Luna storefront.

Or am I missing something? From my understanding, the article states that only “bring your own game” entries can be played on other platforms (of course they can, since the game are probably from Steam,/GOG etc.).

I got both Death Stranding and Heavy Rain for pretty cheap, but that was 5+ years after release.

I wouldn’t pay full price. if you waited for 3 years, you can wait some more for a better price. And unless you insist on top of the line blockbusters and are not interested in any thing else there is an infinite ocean of games with all sorts of concepts and new takes on existing formulas.

That being said, I guess if you want Spider Man, you can only get it from Sony? There are no “Arthropod-man” indie variants, are there? Or is that a no-no for US comics book (and games based on US comic books) fans?