This is Genie 4, our most realistic and interactive world model yet. 🌐 Explore dynamic environments in real time to see how the scene responds, sounds, and how the people in it move, react, and speak.

Terrain brush in action 👇

I'm gonna spell this out because this issue is deceptively subtle: 1. The Steam client and infrastructure is somewhere between "not that hard" and "trivial". It's a download service attached to a payment processor with a smattering of services on the side. Cloud providers handle all the infrastructure these days. 2. Steam takes 30% of gross revenue; ostensibly for the privilege of using these services, but in reality it is purely to get access to the massive Steam userbase. 3. Steam users love Steam and having their whole library in one place. It works. It's dependable. It has sales and cards and achievements, oh my! 4. PC developers have no option but to distribute through Steam or lose the vast majority of sales. Not releasing on Steam destroys the business model. 5. Therefore, no amount of competition will ever unseat Steam. People post-hoc rationalize this with memes about how gracious Gabe is. And how brilliant their services are. But realistically, no avid Steam user wants other stores to succeed. The mere existence of other stores risks splintering their precious collection. They are "all in" on Steam. Invested. Even if an alternative were objectively better, by whatever metric you care about, it would still be of no interest to Steam users. They would in fact find it to be a problem and a threat to their investment. Competition in this space is not only uninteresting to most Steam users, it's actively denigrated! The CONSEQUENCE of this situation, is that 30% of all gross revenue is siphoned out of the PC games industry into a black hole. It doesn't recirculate into studios. It doesn't pay any bonuses. It doesn't fund any sequels or DLC. This is a particularly insidious tax because it's well hidden. It's a second order effect. Most Steams users don't know, and the few that do never consider the aggregate effect this has on their favorite hobby. It's undeniable that, at this point in history, Valve could EASILY lower the distribution fee while maintaining healthy margins. But they don't have to. Users are locked into Steam and therefore developers are stuck paying 30% of gross revenue to Valve. The irony is that Steam users, the very ones maintaining this unbreakable stalemate, would benefit the most from a better financed game development ecosystem. I don't think this is fixable. It's just sad.

r/opensource Reddit mod thinks they know better than the creator of Linux Or rather, they are having a wonderful power trip thinking they have any real influence over actual open source Checks out 😂

r/opensource just banned any project that uses AI. By their own rule, that means the biggest open source project of all time, Linux, is now banned too. The kernel already accepts AI-assisted code. This is the real AI psychosis.

I've given Claude some candidate architectures for "huge physics simulation on steroids". Those candidates are pie in the sky roughly worded computing ideas, badly worded by me. Because this project hinges on the technique's ability to process & compute huge amounts physics information super efficiently Efficiency, I am certain, will come at a tradeoff of accuracy & deterministic solving I will take inaccurate, chaotic, staggered & interleaved updates AS LONG AS it feels fun as fuck in realtime and you can't really notice. Our brains can only pay attention to so much anyway, and I plan to take full advantage of that in how the solver decides what to solve and at what "zoom" level! Unless of course, you're trying to do several chemical reactions in a 1km lake or something. Then you expect shit to slow down But even then, I'd rather the physics to slow & not the game freeze (or perhaps some time slowing effect while stuff catches up!? the matrix tearing haha)

Did you know?

Blizzard is an AoE spell that can maintain absolute zero for up to five seconds, bringing in freezing winds and extreme snowfall in a radius of ten meters.

DuoMo vs GVHMR test

Claude clouds. fragcoord.xyz/s/cpwi3i3h

X emphasizes quote tweets too much. I mean, I like quote tweets as much as anyone else, but you gotta remember that quote tweets are riding on the coattails of someone else's content. You gotta replenish the ecosystem with your own stuff. You gotta post some pure tweets.

I'm the Kim Jong-un of indie games