Re: Dies Irae

somasatori

@somasatori while I never played there past a flirtation with Alpha, I will say, I still remain thoroughly impressed with the pioneering you did with Evennia. It’s incredible how much you taught yourself, and what you pulled off.

From what I’ve heard other people say, and based on what was said behind my back, all I did was boil a bunch of water and churn toxic sludge out of an AI data center.

Ashkuri

The code was so broken on Dies Irae that people could not RP because it just fundamentally didn’t work. People couldn’t see each others’ poses, couldn’t see when someone else came into the room sometimes, couldn’t see OOC messages in the room sometimes, it was very difficult to get even simple scenes done.

Staff was as stressed out about it as anyone, but the issues were (apparently) far reaching and difficult to determine due to the hallucinations of AI code which had been applied to the game. The fatigue of trying to deal with this, and being unable to fix this, surely burned out staff and players alike.

I don’t have the facts or knowledge to say who applied this AI code to the game or why, or if that is really what happened. I do know things were very, very broken though, and that the message given to staff and players was that AI code was the reason.

Tez

@Ashkuri This is actually fascinating to me if true. I want to hear more.

catzilla

@Tez I can’t speak of the AI part, especially since @somasatori is saying/implying they didn’t use AI code… but the rest is true.

More than a few scenes had to be postponed/cancelled due to the issues Ashkuri stated. There were work arounds to the issues but there was never a real solution.

Tez

I explicitly want to avoid any value judging around the AI issue. If there was AI code, ZERO JUDGMENT ZONE. I just want to understand what happened and work through it without it becoming JUDGMENT ZONE on the AI part of it. I’m begging you, mystery person who holds the knowledge. I think it would be fascinating to understand how this actually unfolded in our hobby.

MisterBoring

I too am curious about this issue, because I’ve been eyeballing Evennia for whenever I decide I have time to try running a game, and want to know if there’s something to learn that I can apply to the technical side of a potential future game.

somasatori

@catzilla said in Re: Dies Irae:

@Tez I can’t speak of the AI part, especially since @somasatori is saying/implying they didn’t use AI code… but the rest is true.

I definitely did a lot, like a LOT in the beginning, because my exposure to Python was me screwing around with a Cyberpunk RED project so when Diablerie I was trying to scramble with the tools I had available. By the end of it, I was only using Claude to consult, but the mark had been made as it were.

@Ashkuri said in Re: Dies Irae:

People couldn’t see each others’ poses, couldn’t see when someone else came into the room sometimes, couldn’t see OOC messages in the room sometimes, it was very difficult to get even simple scenes done.

This was due to a bug introduced into the game when I set up the hangouts and ooc/ic thing. In Evennia there are three levels of abstraction on how characters work on a game: Session -> Account -> Object. I didn’t know this when I initially set up the hangouts/ooc/ic auto-travel stuff, but basically what was occurring was that it was moving the character object to the location, which left the account “object” (or meta object?) in the previous location. This is why sometimes you would see OOC chatter and character movement in the OOC room when you were on the grid.

In addition, it wasn’t telling the session id that the object and account were occupying a new room dbref, so that’s where you would get the issue with people not being able to see each other’s poses in the same room. There was effectively a timestamp error on what could be seen. You might be on a session that hasn’t theoretically started yet, especially if you lost connection or had frequently long idle times.

I ended up figuring this out after I left DI and applied the fix to my local copy.

Edit: Also, I really feel no need to defend myself here. Dies Irae was not my project. Scylla set up two pseudo-headstaff through which she could launder her reputation. I was not chosen as a coder when I started, I was brought on to do Mage.

Tez

@somasatori I’ve run into some struggles with the Evennia layers myself as I dick around with it. I’m sympathetic to the issue.

somasatori

@Tez said in Re: Dies Irae:

@somasatori I’ve run into some struggles with the Evennia layers myself as I dick around with it. I’m sympathetic to the issue.

It’s a bit of a mess. Channels are also a little difficult. According to the Evennia dev discord, they’re aware of the problem and told me that channels were notably kind of strung together and needed some review.

Jennkryst

Re: AI Code

So you’re telling me not to trust this ChatGPT Ruby code for the L5R idea? Shock! Horror!

somasatori

@Jennkryst said in Re: Dies Irae:

Re: AI Code

So you’re telling me not to trust this ChatGPT Ruby code for the L5R idea? Shock! Horror!

Here’s my suggestion: if you use AI to do your code, use it to help you learn how to code in the language of your choice., So if you’re coding up Ruby and YAML files using ChatGPT (I would not suggest ChatGPT for coding, but use Claude or Github Copilot), ask it to explain to you why it’s doing what it’s doing.

You may still get some hallucinations, but it will help you understand what sort of variables, functions, and how to write it yourself without relying on AI. As you go along, AI can also be useful if you get exasperated with an issue and say “what am I missing here?” Asking it to solely create, develop, and manage a codebase is not an effective use of the software.

Finally, you want to make sure it’s in an IDE and not something you just interface with on whatever website version you choose.

dvoraen

I’m going to make a very limited response on the subject of “AI” code:

Do not blindly trust it. Period.

You have to vet it for security vulnerabilities and a whole slough of other things. Remember, these are not trained off of the best-of-the-best code — unless someone wants to start releasing training data proving otherwise — and “codebots” will likely not know how to deal with project-specific situations.

Tez

@dvoraen shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh no ai inquisition shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh i’d rather talk about it from general code practices to understand rather than a blanket ai bad shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Juniper

Software development practices are crucial, but the kind of people who find AI the most useful probably haven’t been introduced to those practices so in addition to potentially being let down by the bot, they’re not doing OTHER project activities that would really help them and the bot isn’t going to introduce them to. Version control, unit tests, checking logs, using a debugger?

I have found AI code extremely unhelpful compared to jumping into a debugger, but those things are also learned skills that you can’t assume everyone has.