Show HN: An update to our long-turn FreeCiv experience https://ift.tt/7xDvkQ1

Show HN: An update to our long-turn FreeCiv experience So we have had quiet the journey here. So 70 days ago (aka 73 turns ago) I posted on HN sharing our FreeCiv deployment ( https://ift.tt/TKdnPhR ). FreeCiv is a great game, the clients is very buggy however. I'm using the GTK4 version, but a few others have opted for the QT variant. At some point, we might turn our focus to contributing to improving the client based on our experiences playing the game. We've since added a lot of little fun features: - The editor: you can write to the newspaper Editor and they /might/ publish what you write, quote you, or decide you're full of it and write an opinion piece slamming your reputation. The editor will also reach out to a few players, each turn, and ask for their input on current game matters. - The Intelligence Dashboard. People were forgetting what they were up to, so we added a dashboard showing the timeline of what happens per turn for your player. - beta the online map viewer: I wanted a way to view the map without loading the client, so we started working on a beta map viewer that is HTML based. - The Chronicle (The newspaper) has also grown a bit. Maybe too much? We'll see. The crossword is fun. Some other 'fun' things that happened: my brother in law stopped speaking to me because of in game banter that was taken way too seriously. My friends invaded my wifes territory, and well, she didn't like that either. I'm currently in the lead, but theres still a long way to go from 475BC. https://ift.tt/yrqf2ut May 28, 2026 at 05:54AM

Show HN: Open-Source AI Racing Harness https://ift.tt/gnXTPhK

Show HN: Open-Source AI Racing Harness Hi I'm Dan from Elodin, making an open source real-time capable flight software simulation. For AI Grand Prix contestants, the wait for the Round 1 virtual qualifier simulation has been grueling. If you’re competing, check out our simulation harness to tide you over, built to match the published competition constraints and message format. It runs against real Betaflight, which we learned requires at least 1000 sensor samples per second to run real-time correctly. The competition warranted introducing a new feature to generate the camera sensor directly in the simulation loop. Typically people connect to Unreal or similar game engine to create a camera sensor, which works well but is very heavy. For the simple needs of this challenge, creating sample directly in the loop is very handy and easy to use. Happy to hear your feedback on this! While it's not fancy looking currently, it uses the Rust Bevy game engine, which should allow us to improve the visual fidelity quickly. We all should easily be able to shift our implementation to the published competition sim once it lands. Hope you enjoy and good luck! https://ift.tt/nmzctk7 May 28, 2026 at 02:07AM

Show HN: Epstein Index – Stock returns of Epstein-linked companies since 2008 https://ift.tt/oOdwXc0

Show HN: Epstein Index – Stock returns of Epstein-linked companies since 2008 An index fund of every company linked to Jeffrey Epstein has returned 2,563% since his conviction. The S&P did 609%. https://epstein-index-six.vercel.app/ May 27, 2026 at 11:52PM

Show HN: I used AI to built static recompilers for 5 retro game systems https://ift.tt/7nPodIx

Show HN: I used AI to built static recompilers for 5 retro game systems https://1379.tech/nes-snes-genesis-virtualboy-and-psx-a-journey-with-ai-and-recompilation/ May 26, 2026 at 11:08PM

Show HN: Cross-agent messaging and shared memory over the local filesystem https://ift.tt/hCNSGHy

Show HN: Cross-agent messaging and shared memory over the local filesystem https://oacp.dev May 26, 2026 at 11:14PM

Show HN: Write your BPF programs in Go, not C https://ift.tt/iverutG

Show HN: Write your BPF programs in Go, not C https://ift.tt/d80fkPS May 21, 2026 at 09:55PM

Show HN: I made Pokémon but with real animals in the real world https://ift.tt/sK4yJHp

Show HN: I made Pokémon but with real animals in the real world Firstly, apologies, it's not free. It would be difficult to support this for free, it's a paid game. I will now share the technical details, which will probably be most of interest for HN readers. I previously made a carbon footprint tracking app where you photo objects and it tells you the carbon footprint by using an LLM to estimate the data on the fly, e.g. 32kg CO2e / kg of beef, in the UK. At some point, I realised that it is possible to make a Pokémon-style game, but capturing real animals in the real world. This is now possible because: - image recognition is cheap, i.e. identifying animals, and the models (gpt-4o) can detect a (surprisingly) large number of animals and output their exact species. - LLMs can output a species' full taxonomy, pretty reliably. And, more importantly, they can generate game data quickly, on the fly. It would unfeasible to generate the game sprites (images) for every species (millions, worldwide) and their full evolution chain, e.g. caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly, ahead of time. I realised it's possible to do this in real time. General game flow: - photo animal - send to gpt-4o - return species - send species to LLM, create evolution chain, plus attributes, types and moves. - in parallel, create sprites. All data is cached. The aim of the game is to build up your team and compete with other players to take over gyms. The game is based in the real world, I had to come up with a way to have health centres and shops. These must both have decent coverage, globally. The solution is health centres are places of worship, e.g. churches, mosques, temples etc and shops are real world grocery stores. Every country as far as I can tell has places of worship, with good distribution, which was surprising. Gyms are located in every park worldwide. Challenges: How to get players outside: - I use openstreetmap for the game map, but I overlay my game design on top of it. - To physically make players go out into nature: I use openstreetmap area types to only allow capturing animals when your GPS location is in natural areas, e.g. woodland, parks etc. The aim of the game is to get you out into nature and appreciating animals. - Level system: The solution I came up with is to set the animal levels based on the proximity to built-up areas, e.g. Every ~500 meters you go away from built-up areas, the animal level bands increase by 5 levels. - It would be expensive to render the entire physical world in my game map, so I instead render the map on the fly, deterministically. I also fetch animal calls in real time so that when they enter battle you hear a pigeon cooing, for example, which is pretty cool. I also fetch the animals conservation status, i.e. how endangered is it, and give you more reward (leaves, in-game currency) for capturing rarer animals. I "launched" the game about a month ago, but have not really been publicising it as I've been working on various updates and improvements, but now I am sharing it more openly. It's got about 20 players so far, from around the world, and around 500 unique animal species have already been encountered. Challenges have been keeping the costs low. Servers cost about $200 / month, text-gen is basically free as I get free tokens from OpenAI for sharing data, it's not privacy-related, and image-gen costs about $0.04 per sprite (2 per animal). My background: not a programmer, originally a mechanical engineer and then business development manager, then started learning programming and building apps with AI in the last few years. Feel free to ask me any technical details, happy to share. https://ift.tt/3XHmKND May 26, 2026 at 01:18AM