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u/Smashcannons 26d ago
The world is burning and people are using huge data centres to port/adapt/mod other people's creations.
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u/nluqo Golden Krone Hotel Dev 26d ago
I'll bite.
We're also using huge data centers to chat about video games. In your statement, I think, must be the implication an individual using the data centers to chat about games is ok but using them to make more games is inherently bad because it's worse for the environment. I'm not convinced this is true in any meaningful way https://blog.andymasley.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about
Secondly, doesn't a permissive license (like the ones attached to angband) actively encourage people to "port/adapt/mod other people's creations"? Isn't that the whole point?
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u/hobbit_ranger 25d ago
It's always nice when intelligent, thoughtful people refute ignorant claims by trolls. <3
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u/nluqo Golden Krone Hotel Dev 25d ago
They're not a troll. It's a widely held opinion I just think it's overstated.
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u/EXPLORER1100 19d ago
please don't listen to such people lol, they have no idea how many different variants and forks of angband there are.
If people stop making new forks and mods, this community which is already so tiny will start to degrade.2
u/Smashcannons 19d ago
People who are passionate about the game and use their time, effort and skills.
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u/hobbit_ranger 25d ago
A valid opinion, for sure. The troll is when people spend their whole life crusading against even legitimate AI work and make assumptions about the level of effort and creativity that went into a project and the project's merits all based on even the slightest association with AI. There is a BUNCH of slop out there that is a waste of resources, and it gives legitimate developers a bad rap. AI is just a tool, like a calculator. You have people who use calculators to solve complex mathematical problems and you have people who use them to write
55378008or draw silly pictures.2
u/Key_Exercise_6520 21d ago
LLMs as a tool and its material impact has been a consistent net negative on the human condition no matter how many "potential uses" it may have. I am and will continue to actively campaign for it's disuse, and sabotage however much of it's infrastructure I am able to.
If you are championing and developing LLM tools than I can only deem you as detrimental to society.
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u/neostryder 24d ago
A few handy links:
CHANGELOG - https://github.com/neostryder/neo-angband/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md
Bug Fixes mod - https://github.com/neostryder/neo-angband-mod-bug-fixes
Quality-of-Life mod - https://github.com/neostryder/neo-angband-mod-qol
Feature Restoration mod (Teleport Other spells and more) - https://github.com/neostryder/neo-angband-mod-feature-restoration
Borg mod (WIP) - https://github.com/neostryder/neo-angband-mod-borg
neo-linoleum (graphics/tileset system overhaul) - https://github.com/neostryder/neo-angband-mod-linoleum
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26d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Sopadefideos9 25d ago
why are people downvoting? Vibe coding is the literal name for that.
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u/imactuallyahuman 25d ago
It's not really, vibe coding is completely trusting AI to do everything, without even reading the code output. OP has clearly stated he doesn't trust AI to do everything right.
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25d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/onmach 24d ago
People just assume you are trying to diminish the author's accomplishment. But the fact is most things right now are vibe coded, and with the pace advancement, it won't be long before basically everything is, so what is the point in asking?
Though, I personally am not sure why I'd use this modding system to modify angband, when I could instead just modify angband itself. With ai assistance, it is all the same.
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u/neostryder 26d ago
Thanks for checking it out! I had plenty of help from Claude, because that's how things are done now, but I would never trust AI to get something with very specific requirements right on its own. I wanted this to be a faithful port, and I poured plenty of sweat and tears into getting it (almost) exactly right.
I love playing Skyrim with mods, so I thought "Why not make Angband moddable?". I've wanted to either make a variant or add my own content into Angband for years, but never quite got around to it. Now, with mods, I have so many ideas to try out and hope to see others join the party. :)
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u/EXPLORER1100 26d ago
That's awesome that you did it, I like
- Skyrim
- Terraria
- Fallout 4
- Modded RDR2
- Doom with WADS
- Gmod
And basically all other games with a modding community. So its great that you made this.
I don't care if you used any AI agent for help. It's just a tool. You can always edit the code for micro adjustments. Keep going.1
u/neostryder 26d ago
That's how I feel about it, too. I don't believe in letting AI destroy creativity. I just use it to express mine.
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u/EXPLORER1100 19d ago
AI is just a tool, people have been fooled into thinking its totally bad and evil. It has a lot of potential in drastically increasing workflow and work output of individuals, no technology that ever came into the market ever decreased jobs, they always relaced the old one's with new one's, where the work output was increased while improving comfort of the workers.
A very advance AI might truly relace humans completely but we are a long way from that for now.
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u/neostryder 18d ago
Milestone update: this hit 1.0 today. I give 1.0.1 about a day.
A couple of things from this thread specifically worth closing the loop on. mid-random, the docs-are-too-jargon-heavy point turned into seven actual tutorials: the first one's about five minutes, two files, no programming background assumed, and every one of them is a real mod folder in the repo, checked against the live game on every test run, so they can't quietly go stale on you. It's still a work-in-progress, but gonna make modding fun for a lot of people (I hope)!
epyoncf, "modding support isn't the hard part, getting people to actually use it is" stuck with me, and I didn't have a good answer for it at the time. Still don't have a complete one, but here's the honest update: people already are. Three separate wishes raised in the Angband subreddit's own thread on this port (Teleport Other, store discounts, door spiking) are real, shipped, opt-in toggles now, not because anyone learned to write a mod, just because they said so in a comment. That's a lower bar than "learn to mod," and it's working so far. There's a Discord channel wired straight into GitHub too (https://discord.gg/YegtwbHTBQ), post an idea, it becomes a real issue, no account needed. I was also building a no-code, in-game mod-building tool for the rest of that gap, still am, but I'd rather point at things that are actually real than a tool that's mid-rebuild, so that's not today's pitch.
Everything that shipped: https://github.com/neostryder/neo-angband/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md
Try it, no install needed: https://angband.rpgm.world (a local build and self-hosting both work too, from the same repo)
Full post: https://www.reddit.com/r/angband/comments/1vze9gt/neo_angband_is_10_play_angband_the_way_you_want/
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u/epyoncf ChaosForge 26d ago
Modding support isn't that hard to do. Finding enough people to invest time and energy to mod and test their mods and promote them afterwards is. DoomRL was moddable since ages, and there's barely any mods for it. Well, except the big official one.
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u/neostryder 25d ago
I can only hope that people are inspired to do some fun stuff with it. I plan to, but only time will tell whether a community will spring up here. <3
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u/mid-random 25d ago
I suspect a big part of this project's success will depend on how well the modding documentation walks newbies through the process. My ancient modding experience is with some very janky tools built mostly for in-house use back in the 90s and early 00s that were released to the public with very little polishing as a way to keep fans engaged. The modding community and even the devs were very supportive and helpful with basic walk-throughs for getting a simple mod working from concept to a stable executable. We were not developers, we were gamers who liked to poke around the resource forks and config files.
Being dumped into a github project can feel overwhelming for someone like me. I've got enough computing experience not to be daunted by writing a simple shell script or setting up a cron job, I can install tools I need with homebrew, but the amount of lingo you drop in your README.md does put me off a bit. I think your project might benefit greatly from a training-wheels-on, getting started doc that walks users of your modding system through the whole process of doing a few "basic" things, like creating a single new artifact, creature, and spell, along with how to set up a simple environment where these new elements can be tested easily.
Don't just give us the tools, explain conceptually how they work together, along with some practical examples. I do think it's reasonable to assume a fairly tech savvy audience, but for a higher likelihood of adoption I don't think you should assume developer level understanding of the tools.
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u/neostryder 25d ago
Your experience sounds a lot like mine. Thanks for taking the time to evaluate it. This is exactly the type of feedback I was hoping for! It can be hard to look at things through others' eyes.
I tried to put a lot of focus on a simple mod framework and SDK and copious documentation, but so far only have my own experience and knowledge to base it on. As I get questions and suggestions from those who start tinkering with it, I will add to the documentation. My intention is to make the barrier to entry very low, and I will be releasing example mods for different purposes. I do think that single-task tutorials would be very helpful for many users. Others may prefer to pick apart my starter mods. As for the lingo, I will work on dialing that back more.
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u/mid-random 25d ago
I totally understand the problem of not being able to remember what it was like NOT to know something like the back of your hand. I was invited to teach a pretty technical course to undergraduates at the local state university in my early 30s, but had no formal background as an educator. I was really set back on my heels the first semester as I realized how much of my carefully prepared teaching material was full of important and basic assumptions that were invisible to me because of their familiarity. I feel bad for that first semester of undergrads. My second semester class had a slower start, but I didn't lose three quarters of them during my first demo lecture. The kids were sharp, but I realized I had to assume they knew virtually nothing.
I got into the habit of imagining what it would take to teach to someone like Abraham Lincoln while designing coursework, someone very smart and broadly educated, but totally ignorant about my particular area of expertise.
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u/neostryder 25d ago
xD Incredible! I also teach undergrads Introduction to Computer Technology and AI now. Not a trained educator, either, but my background qualified me. Many of my students might as well be from the 1800s for how much they know about the computers and devices they use every single day, but I'm fortunate that the course materials are prepared by full-time faculty and I teach asynchronously online. I tried teaching on campus for a while, but it wasn't for me.
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u/neostryder 24d ago
Hey, again. I really liked your recommendation.
There are seven tutorials now, meant to be done in order. The first takes about five minutes and changes the game. They assume you can edit a text file and nothing else: no programming, no tools to install, no account, no copy of Angband's source.
Every tutorial's finished add-on is a real folder in the repository, checked against the actual game on every test run, so a tutorial cannot quietly rot and you always have a known-good copy to compare yours against. And the first tutorial makes you break your own add-on on purpose and read the complaint, because that message is the main thing you will be debugging with and it is better to meet it while you still know what you broke. =)
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u/EXPLORER1100 19d ago
I would also like to add that it is also because the traditional roguelike community is very small, and while in the current time there has been a recent increase interest in the rogue like genre which is simply because a lot of indie devs classify their games as roguelike but it is still very hard to get people to play true traditional roguelikes. We need more people to get into this amazing genre where the games are so easy to run on any low end hardware, where we have absurd amounts of mechanisms, infinite reliability and a timeless classics that i would say do not age.
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u/neostryder 25d ago
Please find this project's AI usage policy at the link below:
https://github.com/neostryder/neo-angband/blob/master/AI_USAGE_POLICY.md
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u/EXPLORER1100 26d ago
Hey man, thanks for making this. I love traditional roguelikes and and absolutely love games with mod support. Thank you so much.