| ▲ | himata4113 3 hours ago |
| I have a good story to share that I came across recently. Around 2 years ago I had to clean up a mess because someone who doesn't really know what they're doing designed an instancing system for a game. They heavily used AI to design every part of it and it was awful. Data corruption, performance problems, lost items, race conditions everything you can think of was an issue. It took me 2 weeks just to get it to an "acceptable" level and it was still awful as the whole design was simply flawed. Fast forward to today: different company, same person, SAME issues with an AI that is 'allegedly' much better than it was. This time I only heard about these issues and wasn't the one who had to deal with it so I just had a really good laugh. AI is only as good as the person using it, that's why we have such vast range of what people "claim" AI can do and why everyone has way different opinions of it. |
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| ▲ | otar 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > AI is only as good as the person using it, that's why we have such vast range of what people "claim" AI can do and why everyone has way different opinions of it. Banger statement. |
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| ▲ | onlyrealcuzzo 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > They heavily used AI to design every part of it and it was awful. Data corruption, performance problems, lost items, race conditions everything you can think of was an issue. Presumably that's better than no game at all. > It took me 2 weeks just to get it to an "acceptable" level and it was still awful as the whole design was simply flawed. Doing 2 weeks of fixing might have been hell, but this sounds like it was overall still a great deal for the company. You're not really selling the "AI is useless story". It might be, but your anecdote seems like just another case of AI being worth it, though obviously flawed. |
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| ▲ | himata4113 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | No the game failed because of these non stop issues, it lost all hype and the "fixed" version couldn't sustain itself anymore as it took around a month to fix the remaining issues. At the 2nd company it wasted thousands of dollars of advertisement because the server could not withstand the load and obviously data loss issues tained the image forever and will likely end up the same way. Also please don't take this as "AI is useless". I use AI and I use it a lot. It's great and I love it. However, without a good understanding of architecture and general development structure you end up with things that can't scale and fail. | | |
| ▲ | bitexploder 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | What particularly gets me is if you use AI with a bit of engineering rigor, especially around design and testing my experience is the latest models are great to work with. They can structure performance and stability tests, implement 90%. Humans have to do the hardest and critical 10% of the design. The current tools are good enough to do virtually all of the implementation now if your quality gates are right and your design is good enough, but you absolutely have to design the right things for your scale and reliability needs or very bad things are in store. | |
| ▲ | onlyrealcuzzo an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > No the game failed because of these non stop issues You should've led with that then. The company is likely to disagree and think it failed for a number of reasons, that only being one of them, and still depending on the cost may be very happy with their decision. For one, even if it was a complete dumpster fire disaster, that is at least potentially a learning opportunity. Whether they saw it as one is a different thing entirely. If they think they can make games for 1/10th the engineering price, they are likely going to try until proven otherwise. It's harder to convince them, no, it can't be done, just trust me, bro, I know from experience of never even trying. | | |
| ▲ | himata4113 23 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Well you can still save 10x if you pick the right people instead of picking people that don't have the experience or knowledge to pull something like that off. And the only person learning (or failing to learn) is a developer which the company does not own. |
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| ▲ | darkerside 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | If it were really groundbreaking, I imagine it wouldn't have burned out after a little missed hype. See No Man's Sky. The other way to look at this is, thank goodness we didn't waste months or years on a failed game concept. Instead we got to market and validated (or invalidated) the concept fast. | | |
| ▲ | himata4113 25 minutes ago | parent [-] | | it's a validated concept with a popular youtuber behind it, tried and true method that worked for years all brought down by game being non functional. |
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| ▲ | zaphirplane 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Why does it “sound” like a good thing for the company? Unless it’s a mega establishment product people move on and don’t stick with buggy crashing products This wouldn’t be acceptable for a car safety, well I could like a whole bunch but you should get the idea | |
| ▲ | surgical_fire 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Presumably that's better than no game at all. Wrong. A bad game can absolutely tank a studio. Shipping a game that has awful reviews will absolutely affect negatively your sales for future games. | | |
| ▲ | himata4113 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Luckily this was minecraft so stakes aren't as high, but it definitely tainted the reputation of the company behind it and youtubers will likely never work with them again. |
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| ▲ | rco8786 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > AI is only as good as the person using it Nailed it. That said, it couldn't have possibly been that bad if you got it to "acceptable" in 2 weeks. |
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| ▲ | himata4113 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I used AI too and acceptable means "you can play it without losing your progress". |
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| ▲ | amarant an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You've hit the nail on the head as we say where I'm from. This is also why I think the "boycott AI" movement is misguided. AI doesn't produce slop: unskilled AI operators do. Heck just the other day I saw a headline about a Nobel literature laureate apparently using AI, with some "expert" confidently claiming the winning novel was 100% generated. AI output quality ranges from slop to Nobel price worthy, depending on who uses it. Which seems to support the notion that it's a tool, much like any other. |
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| ▲ | bunderbunder 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > AI is only as good as the person using it I think it might be even worse than that. It seems to be a multiplier for the Dunning-Kruger effect. Possibly because being trained to exhibit positive demeanor means that it will always tell you you're the best, no matter what. |
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| ▲ | himata4113 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Not sure why I saw this getting downvoted. This is exactly what is happening to that person, they think they are way more capable then they really are that's why they're taking on hard challenges and high complexity tasks when they're not ready for it. |
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| ▲ | hmokiguess 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| What is an instancing system? |
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| ▲ | duckmysick 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | To better scale the game infrastructure, instead of letting every player on the same big server, they are put in different smaller servers (instances). Players can interact with other players on the same instance (see them, do quests together, trade, etc.). Sort of like AWS instances. Normally instances are random within the same region, but usually there's a system in place so you can join the same one as your friend. |
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