gakles
11d ago
Just got back into Project Zomboid. The game is so fun when it works, but the pace of development is killing me. I dropped it a year ago in anticipation of NPCs in build 42, but they still aren't here, and I'm playing on build 41 because half the mods I want to use are unsupported in B42. Currently playing a mechanic with the scrap warrior mod on 4x pop no respawn, hopefully it'll be a long playthrough but I'm struggling to clear out a safe zone to even begin dealing with the bigger hordes. The FPS optimization mods are impressive, I went from a stuttering nightmare to a decent experience even when around a 100+ horde.
gakles
11d ago
I think the game has huge potential, particularly with the already thriving, somewhat supported modding scene. I'm honestly a little concerned the devs are spending too much time making new planes and not new systems/qol/optimization, because they'll announce a plane in the roadmap (eg. heavy cargo lifter) and modders will spin one out in half a month.
gakles
16d ago
Neat! I've been burning my excess tokens from claude's $20 tier trying to vibecode my own videogame. I want to make a naval warfare sim sorta like Rule the Waves but in the modern era. I have minimal coding experience (I don't know how to use github) and have basically just been feeding claude prompts and letting it sort things out.
So far the going has been good, if a bit slow. I tend to burn through the 5-hour limit within an hourish using opus on medium thinking, with about 3-4 hours every week dedicated to this for the last 2-ish months. The sim needs to run on a mac, so I've spent a lot of tokens telling claude to plan the architecture and look for optimizations, which, to my amateur analysis, has been reasonably successful. The latest version is 47k lines of typescript (is this good? bad? I don't know :) ). Theres ships with different modules, planes, doctrines, missiles of various types, and intercept programming, as well as reasonably(I believe) accurate modelling of radar and flight performance.
I've tried using Sonnet to code, and it works surprising well for things which don't require too much forethought, like "make a model and loadout for an arleigh burke destroyer". It's not so great at things like "The tomahawk missiles keep falling into the sea after launch, find out why and fix it", where it tends to get fixated on one aspect or metric and ignoring others. In the latter case, the launch booster didn't have enough thrust, but it kept trying smudge the lift surface size to get the missiles to fly without it. As a whole, I've found that using Opus (and fable, for the brief moments it was available) lead to net faster progress and implementation of systems I wanted, with at least an order of magnitude less mistakes. A few weeks ago I migrated from a browser interface to electron I believe and Opus made the switch painlessly while I'm sure Sonnet would have fumbled.
I'm decently happy with the current program: ships follow orders, missiles fly, some are intercepted, theres cool sprays of CIWS and 5 inch guns when cruise missiles get to close, and airplanes are mostly capable of launching standoff munitions and doing air combat. That beiing said, it's pretty rough on the edges, theres no main menu or situation setup: I have to add ships/planes via lines of code if I want them in the simulation.
If anyone with experience wants to check it out I'll happily post the code to github. I'd love feedback, I'm sure the llms have missed some big things, somewhere, but I'm to dumb to ask the right questions.
gakles
25d ago
World War Z was a book which really stuck with me. I read it in my early teens and went into it looking for the archetypical zombie thriller and I was completely blindsided by the breadth of storytelling. Brooks' choice to tell the story from ordinary people, discussing their lived experiences made each vignette much more real to me. I can honestly say that by the time I was halfway through I was thinking about how hard it would be to block the staircase with sofa. Brooks has dropped in a ton of personal moralizing to the story, pretty obvious in certain parts during my most recent re-read, but as a teen I was too enraptured by the story and too young to pick up on most of. For those interested in more WWZ content there is a super long althist rewrite from a very leftist perspective in this thread. It's even more heavyhanded than the original book and laughable at times but a fun (and occasionally enraging) read. I haven't found another book like WWZ with that approach to storytelling and grounded approach to zombies. Please let me know if you know of any others like it!
WARNO! I kinda hate the base game for being too arcady and competitive at times so I've been playing with either the CRMxWIF modpack or rebsfrago. Rebsfrago is soooo slow but pretty fun, and building artillery dominance can be fun. CRMxWIF is great but the roster is too limited and theres not too many neat things units can do, like SEAD or really nice artillery strikes. My micro is pretty shit but im having fun using long range weapons to snipe the backline, and my ai teammates do most of the real pushing. I'm starting to get a feel for what a good unit roster is (in both mods) but I just can't seem to get a combined arms push going, I'll be able to take the next copse of trees if I have all sorts of indirect support but I find it miles easier to just erode the enemy with long range fires, I'll get twice the kills, lose fewer units, and don't have to micro my frontline as much.
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