Show HN: Those Who Die as Cattle https://ift.tt/9f87sZm

Show HN: Those Who Die as Cattle What if a game gave you the backstory of everyone you killed or got killed? I feel like I've heard this question asked before, but I've never seen it done. For Ludum Dare 56 (a game jam), I spent 48 hours building a prototype called Those Who Die As Cattle, a WW1 trench warfare simulation game. I used ChatGPT 4o-mini to generate details for the 12,000 soldiers involved in the game. Notably, I had to supply names because it couldn't introduce sufficient variety. I also had to add randomly generated adjectives for the soldiers; otherwise, the prompts were too similar, even with different seeds and temperatures. Initially, I used Claude (which I usually prefer), but it made every soldier a former carpenter’s apprentice. Since this is a game and your actions should matter, instead of generating one block of text, I had it generate JSON by providing a template with cues for different things that might happen to the soldier. I used these to dynamically assemble a story for each casualty. For example: { "briefBio": "Tell me a little bit about the solider", // Putting this first is critical to introduce variety … "lastThoughtsArtilleryDead": "What are his last thoughts as he dies from an artillery strike" , … "effectOnOthersShotInjured": "What are the long term impacts on the people who care about him when he is seriously injured by a bullet wound", } The prompt template can be found here: https://ift.tt/4GbAZYT... The underlying simulation was programmed using Unity ECS (Entity Component System) and simulated, to some degree, each soldier and artillery piece. Casualties were taken in entity order, so there's some predictability regarding when each name gets added to the list, though it isn't completely deterministic. The area where I skimped the most was the UI, but the game is in a playable state if you're willing to look at the center column and figure out what the numbers mean. A final notable learning is that Unity UI toolkit (their modern, web dev like solution) performs significantly better on the web than in the native linux build, at least on the 2022 LTS version of Unity. This suggests that they may be leveraging the rendering efficiencies built into browsers. https://ift.tt/LmcW6Tr October 14, 2024 at 09:32PM

Show HN: Bolt.new – dev sandbox with AI from StackBlitz https://ift.tt/unlhxby

Show HN: Bolt.new – dev sandbox with AI from StackBlitz https://bolt.new/ October 14, 2024 at 11:51PM

Show HN: Book to Classical Music Soundtrack https://ift.tt/AE5BnZj

Show HN: Book to Classical Music Soundtrack Hey, HN, literature and classical music are two of my biggest passions, and I always found it interesting how some classical pieces fit to the stories they are barely connected with. E.g. some of Tchaikovsky's music will always evoke the world of Harry Potter for me; music of Sibelius takes me to the same landscapes as writings of Tolkien - of course, these clearly result from John Williams' and Howard Shore's direct inspirations from the romantic composers when creating the soundtracks for the movie adaptations. For a more niche example, music of Olivier Messiaen fits in my view the book L'Écume Des Jours by Boris Vian - grandiose movements of the Turangalila symphony for the first half of the story, the expressionism and sadness of Vingt Regards the latter. The examples are numerous. My recent idea was to somehow automate this pairing of literature and music. It works quite simply - at first, I collected a large dataset of classical music pieces with text descriptions, which I transformed into embeddings. When generating a soundtrack, I use an LLM to create a description of what kind of music would be suitable for the story, and the embedding of this description is used to fetch the most relevant tracks. While the resulting playlist can barely be understood as "soundtrack" at this point, it can be a pleasant background playlist for reading the book. Thanks in advance for any suggestions or feedback :) https://ift.tt/o8MH7f9 October 14, 2024 at 02:58AM

Show HN: The fastest Ethereum graph explorer (OpenSource) https://ift.tt/9kfpAVo

Show HN: The fastest Ethereum graph explorer (OpenSource) https://dictynna.com/ October 14, 2024 at 12:51AM

Show HN: I've added undo and redo to IsoCity https://ift.tt/ORW4U6c

Show HN: I've added undo and redo to IsoCity https://ift.tt/JBpQA1e October 12, 2024 at 08:13AM

Show HN: SSO – Small String Optimization https://ift.tt/0QKzngo

Show HN: SSO – Small String Optimization I wrote this just for fun when saw article about sso in Rust[1]. My string can store up to 23 (excluding null-terminator) 8-bit chars without calling allocator. Here I can mistake, but.. Curious fact: both - libstdc++[2] and libc++[3] - do access to union member without any check that it is active now. AFAIK, this is UB in C++. But I assume that they just rely on theirs compiler features. I tried to avoid this using `std::byte[]`. But I'm still sure that there are several UB's in my code :) [1] https://ift.tt/8EIgPaf... [2] https://ift.tt/mMKoTp7... [3] https://ift.tt/usYmpBW... https://ift.tt/etraDwB October 12, 2024 at 11:56PM

Show HN: AI Podcast Generator https://ift.tt/DhYrjqS

Show HN: AI Podcast Generator https://zenmic.com/app/ October 12, 2024 at 11:40PM