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It's beautiful. But also pretty unsatisfying in a way. Roads don't make sense. Rivers barely make sense. There's no higher-scale structure - the reason why most games with incremental procedural generation usually feel stale after a while, and always static. Every planet is different, yet feels the same.

(Dwarf Fortress is the one procedural game I know - besides maybe its more faithful clones - which isn't static. But the procedural generation there is also mostly not incremental, it generates the whole world beforehand and only some of the fill-in details are incrementally generated).

The holy grail has to be a graph-based refinement/embellishment system, where it generates just the nodes, temporally and spatially, which matter for the situation the player is in.


That's a general problem with procedurally generated content.

Remember that wave function collapse focuses on local optimization. The algorithm can’t take a step back and look at the whole map. That’s why you won’t get a sensible road network. Rivers are only slightly better when the follow height gradients.

What you can do, and this is also a general advice for procgen, is to mix in some templates before WCF runs. Often, a bit of post-processing is needed as well.

The templates can be hand-designed, or generated with simpler procgen code. Place a few towns on the map, connect them with roads, and then let WFC fill in the gaps to create a more interesting landscape.


As I recall, a lot goes into DF's world generation, including erosion simulation and the like to achieve a realistic result. That game is the embodiment of over-engineering, after all.

I think it helps in Dwarf Fortress that you are not really exploring the world (well, unless you play adventurer mode, but that seems far less popular), you pick a site and settle and start building. You see far less of the world than in something like Minecraft. Yes, you get to see more of the world over multiple runs, but it is still far more limited.

Rimworld is interesting here, as it is what I would consider a DF style game. And I would have said the same for it, except that the latest expansion (Oddessy) added space ships that you can build, and fly to another area. While fun this has made the procedural generation show its weaknesses.

(That said, DF world gen is top notch, but probably not quite as good as it may seem due to what I mentioned.)


Situation-adaptive generation also gets predictable and boring once you can read it easily. Classic procedural generation is good for perceived variety and breaking small patterns, but it doesn't introduce novelty on its own, it just shifts it from the asset design to the algorithm design.

Noita is also procedural, but not static, although I'm not sure if that's what you're talking about.

> Roads don't make sense. Rivers barely make sense. There's no higher-scale structure

It feels a bit like the graphical equivalent of Markov chain text generation.


It's not quite reset. Harmful mutations do accumulate. Sexual reproduction is how we keep up with them - the selection effect (probably most of it at the sperm stage?) pushes it so that you're more likely to get a child with the less-damaged sides of their parents's DNA.

Sure, but should "societal optimal" be a concern for the individual? I think not. Government economists, maybe.

I was absolutely disgusted by stuff like 24 and zero dark thirty when it came out. "If you cut the throat of the terrorist's son he'll break down and tell you where the bomb is" - they expected the audience to treat that as plausible narrative, and a lot of them clearly did.

A lot of the war propaganda from back then is also depressingly similar to what gets pumped out now: you can't argue with success, you don't want to be on the losers' side do you?


To give 24 some credit, it showed some Americans as complicit in the terrorism or corruption in the story. ZDT also touched on how torture wasn't as effective as assumed. I agree that the broader themes often feel biased/propagandized, framing the anti-hero, who's basically acting as a proxy for the government, as justified at almost any cost.

Similarly in the pilot episode of Designated Survivor. "Let's nuke Teheran" was seen as a valid, and brilliant, tactical move in order to get negotiations with Iran to go Kiefer Sutherland's way.

Thing is, unsubscribe links are often an "inform spammers that this mail address is in use" link. Even the ones Gmail offers up.

If I didn't click their button to subscribe, I'm not clicking their button to unsubscribe. Who's to say they won't just "sign me up" again after a while? In fact I know several large US corporations which routinely sign you up for notifications again after a few months.


If you didn't click the button, then of course, you don't send the unsubscribe message.

If you did subscribe to a newsletter and no longer want to receive it (which is the majority of these cases), then the unsubscribe action is the logical thing to do.


> If you did subscribe to a newsletter and no longer want to receive it (which is the majority of these cases), then the unsubscribe action is the logical thing to do.

Not the second time :-)


> They will have a chance to decide how they want their government to be run.

That depends on what's on the ballot.

> The system is working.

If it is, how did you end up here again?


Probably. There are different kinds of political power though; it seems the qwen architects are using one right now.

The real political power we have through our vote is probably smaller than the political power most of us here have from the option to quit.


Mullvad says it is, they're more credible than Ofcom or Ofcom's fans. The trick of strong-arming all providers of a certain medium to "self"-censor in order to implement advance censorship is an old trick.

Advance censorship is typically forbidden, for good reason. It's one thing to go after someone for lying, another thing to sit there all the time and try to make sure no lies are ever heard.


What's the difference? Efficacy in preventing lies from being aired?

when censored in advance, the governing body can prevent whatever they want and simply claim it was prevented because of lying. how are you going to know?

What troubles me about using the word “lie” is it becomes up to a body of bureaucrats to determine what is true.

Instead, fight misinformation with superior information.


>it becomes up to a body of bureaucrats to determine what is true.

I think we have a ministry for that.


I always forget, what year was that created in? 1984?

the ministry of silly walks? ;-)

Israel will not tolerate an economically developed or at all democratic Iran. They want Iran to be where Gaza is and Libanon is heading. It's not just the leaders who have nothing to lose.

You would think the hebrew population is just exhausted and hardened and driven a little crazy by several generations of 'deathtoisrael' 'deathtoisrael' drilled into the brains of millions of schoolchildren every year - each /year/'s school intake of impressionable brains is larger than the total world Jewish population. In the end the hebrew-speakers' response will not be simply rational as they are as much mentally affected as the iran citizenry, which is orders of magnitude larger.

It's typical the world community has put up with the naked genocidal intent of the Iran government - which is by now in a sense woven into its constitution and mystical-apocalyptic self-conception - as if it were a musical curious style -- as they build militias saying the same on every border, financing the bizarre suicide campaigns of early 2000s etc. to stop a 2 state solution and keep the party going.

With 'deathtoamerica deathtoamerica' noblesse oblige requires us to pretend it is merely comical. But the 'uppity, arrogant' jewish state is microscopic by comparison with titanic Persian Empire. The disproportion (80x) is far more extreme than even USSR or USA v Afghanistan or USA v Vietnam (30x.


You're talking about Iran's genocidal intent as if Israel has not just finished actually committing one. And their supposed exhaustion from hate from their neighbors - The truth is they are gleefully hyper aggressive and hyper violent and ultra racist as well.

Israel doesn't have the power to choose here though, Israel is far from strong enough to invade Iran so it doesn't matter what they think.

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