Nothing? In practice, if this were to happen on a noticeable scale it would mean Lemmy has gone mainstream. That said, within a federated system, it’s entirely possible to create isolated, defederated webrings - for example, networks consisting solely of invite-based instances. If something like this becomes a necessity, it might lead to formation of multiple such webrings and they might even decide to federate with each other someday.

Interesting. I immediately see first two replies as LLM, third sound like a generic pre-LLM bot autopost, the last one sounds kinda legit. Because it’s so short and forward, it’s really hard for me to see LLM behind it. I don’t know what they’re talking about though, maybe it’s easier to spot the bot from semantics POV.

With technology like this, it’s only a matter of time before big players start using it all over the internet, whether for commerce, propaganda, or pushing their agenda. So it’s interesting to observe an amateur trying it right now and sharing their findings. If anything, it might give us a glimpse of what the future holds.

Do you generate replies in a custom way every time, adjusting the prompt and supervising the result, or do you have fully-automatic system? If you do use any sort of manual intervention on per post basis, whatever you’re doing is not going to work as a bot.

With human post-processing it’s definitely more complicated. Bots usually post fully automatic content, without human supervision and editing.

Imo their style of writing is very noticeable. You can obcure that by prompting LLM to deliberately change that, but I think it’s still often noticeable, not only specific wordings, but higher-level structure of replies as well. At least, that’s always been the case for me with ChatGPT. Don’t have much experience with other models.

What I would expect to happen is: their posts quickly start getting many downvotes and comments saying they sound like an AI bot. This, in turn, will make it easy for others to notice and block them individually. Other than that, I’ve never heard of automated solutions to detect LLM posting.

Don’t underestimate what hobbyists want in their games. It’s actually AAA games that don’t want to risk and do fairly standard stuff while indies/hobbyists like to experiment and implement unorthodox mechanics and visuals. I think that, for example, writing your own 3rd person character controller (with stuff like snappy raw input movement, walljumps and also properly handling moving/rotating platforms) and cartoonish NPR rendering requires going through a lot more irrelevant systems in UE5 than doing the same in many other engines including Unity, Godot, and UPBGE. In Unity there actually is a similar kind of bloat (like URP), but it’s optional and you can just hack “good old” built-in render pipeline (also has tons of ready-to-use snippets and shaders open-sourced by community through years). In other words for me UE5 vs other engines is more like Java EE vs Python (or NodeJS) than Java EE vs Wordpress. UE5’s complexity is more of too many abstraction layers and lengthy workflows rather than being too low-level and flexible. Lightweight and flexible engines are great for hobbyists, game constructors are fine too for those who really want something very basic.

Arguing about UE5 feels just as bloated and convoluted as using the engine itself! Sorry, I couldn’t resist 😅

If a slow startup of the editor the first time

By “one-time learning cost” I meant that to learn how to do a thing in UE5 you will have to spend 95% of time learning things you won’t ever need to understand that 5% that you actually want. Yes, it’s also a one-time cost, but it’s not one-time cost most developers want to pay unless they really need all that compexity.

It is a philosophical difference.

It’s a personal productivity difference. If you are able to allocate N hours to make a game and you don’t need most of those features, you will be much more likely to finish that game in time in a simpler engine.

one time cost

Maybe stuff like shaders compiling isn’t a big deal in the long run, but one-time cost in terms of learning may be too much. If you’re going to use 5% of its features, having to go through the rest 95% when learning how to do things is a big distraction and productivity killer. Also, there is a surge of AAA games made in UE5 that have critical performance issues that developers struggle to fix for extended periods of time after release, killing performance even on the most top-notch hardware that most gamers could never afford.

an indicator that you probably shouldn’t be developing medium fidelity 3d games on a potato

Why though? Just use other engine and you’re good.

For “hobbyist” 3d games, Unity is still the king.

I’m doing a hobbyist 3d game and I’m using UPBGE. It’s terrible in a lot of ways, depsgraph kills performance, but it’s very convenient to just hit P and play during 3d modelling of the scene. This is what I would call an engine for “hobbyist”. Unity is a decent engine for professionals, for indies, for AAA, for AA, for a lot of things. At least, technically it’s there. Its management is a big issue though.

I checked some random game, which should have assets worth few gb minimum, got redirected to shady mediafire link with 10mb archive. I don’t even have to download it to tell it’s a virus.

Unreal is easy to pick up for 3D.

Unreal Engine 1.5 - yeah, maybe. Definitely not UE5. It’s one of the most complicated, convoluted and heavyweight systems in existence. Just engine itself is 100gb+ download, opening it the first time takes 30m to compile shaders. Just reading briefly through gtlf import dialog took me like 10minutes.

There are plenty of “zoomers” playing “boomer shooters”, old TES games, retrogaming on emulators, etc. In my opinion, retrogaming increased significantly during the last decade. It’s kinda a part of mainstream gaming now, it was more niche before.

Doom … mod-friendly

If it’s non-standard engine (“sourceport” in Doom terminology) with its own scripting infrastructure (like GZDoom) then sure. Vanilla and Boom compatible engines are kinda tricky, DeHackEd isn’t exactly the easiest modding approach. Mapping-friendly - for sure, but modding - less so.

I’m also using the same system as you. Currently I’m playing Skyrim as a story/ambiance game and Doom 2 (community maps/mapsets, which are releasing every day) as forever playable game. I have time to play more, but I somehow settled on this as I find it very comfortable and enjoyable. Before current Skyrim playthrough I played Steins;Gate and before that original Silent Hill 1 and so on. As infinite games I also sometimes play Quake (community maps/mapsets) and modded Minecraft.

Good job writing this up! When I picked UPBGE I expected the only big performance concern to be highpoly deformations in rig animations, so I thought it’s a no issue for me as I’m doing a very lowpoly thing. Eventually depsgraph turned out a massive problem and at this point every new dozen of objects added to scene hits FPS in mysterious ways, even when there are no constraints or anything like that on those particular objects. Overall I’m using maybe a two dozens of constraints and one simple geonodes setup in the scene, and being able to use those was one the biggest motivations to use UPBGE at all. Turned out they’re really problematic due to depsgraph. I’m sticking with UPBGE for my current project, but I’m really considering moving on afterwards, the way I choose to organise everything in separate composable components hopefully going to make porting it simple. I actually ported enemy ai state machine from my other Godot project to UPGBE, and now it seems I’m going to port evolved version of it either back to Godot or maybe even Unity 😅 Anyway, it’s very fun and productive working with UPBGE, but performance is surprisingly too bad even for very simple lowpoly games, when they require a lot of dynamic objects in the scene.

I personally mostly watch gaming streams as a background for work, never as focus activity. As a main activity I definitely prefer to play myself rather than watch others playing, with a rare exception when I’m just interested to see a few minutes of gameplay of some new game to see if I’m interested in it.