Yes. A lot of properties in a small town well outside a major city limit can feel pretty rural (and may not be super-expensive). You're probably not walking to a grocery store but you can likely drive to one in 15 minutes or so.
I'm about 50 miles outside of Boston/Cambridge and have easy access to all the shopping I care about and even driving into the city for theater etc. isn't an undue burden. Between myself and a couple other neighbors we're on about 75 acres and adjacent to conservation land.
Despite Linux, llvm and Blender proving that open source can beat closed source, GIMP has failed for a very long time. If Microsoft sold something like GIMP, we've never hear the end of criticisms.
I'm not good enough to fix it, but I hope one day a team of great programmers simply restart from scratch. If they simply copied Affinity's or Photoshop's UI and core functionality, we'd have a winner.
Many years ago I spent quite some time getting used to Gimp and did some designing on it, etc. I also wrote a tutorial for it to create some torn paper effect.
I say all this to give some context to the following: GIMP is just not great software. It is super unintuitive and when you don't use it for a while, you totally forget how to use it to select things, put them on layers, etc.
I use Pixelmator on Mac. I bought it years ago and haven't regretted it. It is getting better and better of the years, the UI is great. When I use linux I miss Pixelmator more than I do Photoshop. So if someone were to create a Pixelmator-inspired editor for linux, that would be great.
The unfortunate part is gimp is intensely useful software with many amazing features...buried under such an awkward interface.
I used it today for doing a color range selection to get an estimate for parameters to use in image magick. It had the easiest dynamic visualization of the matte for the selected range as I was selecting. It did exactly what I needed, very well.
I also tested out krita and nuke. Was easier in gimp.
But gimp is still the tool of last resort as it is just so painful to use. I wish there was a more positive engagement between the graphics community and the gimp devs. It feels very combative and negative compared with tools like krita and blender.
I've used GIMP and Photoshop for a very long time (close to 30 years).
In ~1998, GIMP was not quite as good as Photoshop 5 and was more awkward to use, but you could see how it could close the gap. It had impressive underlying tech that could handle large images on computers at the time. There was an expansive library of weird and neat plug-ins and scripts. It felt like we were at the start of a great shift in which OSS software would "catch up" and eventually replace desktop power tools, just as Linux had done with web servers. It was... the year of Linux on the Desktop!
By ~2005, GIMP was starting to really catch up to where Photoshop was in 1998, but Photoshop had added lots of quality of line features like adjustment layers and layer effects, way better text rendering, and amazing new features like spot healing brushes, vanishing point warping, etc. The gap was widening. But GIMP still did all the core stuff, and Photoshop was annoying users by shoving Adobe Bridge down their throat, etc. So people were still hopeful for a replacement.
By ~2012, GIMP was adding.. an awkward single window mode? It lacked tons of by-now-basic features that made it totally impractical for professional use. Photoshop, meanwhile, was adding amazing time-saving features like Content-Aware Patch and Move that seemed "magic" at the time. The tech gap was widening, but Adobe was also pushing subscriptions down users' throats, which was very unpopular, so GIMP still had a chance to make a come back.
By ~2018, GIMP was finally adding.. basic CMYK support for printing, something which literally no one uses GIMP for professionally and was a dying need? Meanwhile, Photoshop was demoing an AI object selection tool that could magically select objects without needing to trace them, which came out in 2019. Using GIMP felt like using software from a decade previous.
The last 5 years have been the worst for GIMP. Photoshop has been improving at an astonishing rate. Now it's literally what photo editing looked like in 90's movies - you just open an image, click "select object" and it perfectly selects it, and lets you move/drag/add elements with AI, etc. You can do edits in seconds now that used to take hours, and the results are really good.
None of this is a complaint about GIMP or all the people who contributed to it. It's impossible for a few volunteers to complete with infinite money and hundreds of full-time employees. But Photoshop and GIMP are no longer in the same league. And Adobe knows this, which is why it can get away with punitive subscription-only pricing.
It used to lack non-destructive editing ("adjustment layers" in Photoshop parlance) until recently, it's a core foundation of editing workflows for designers and photographers, it lets you layer transformations of over immutable rasters. This was in Photoshop since 2005.
It has been a very long time since I tried GIMP (>15 years) to remember everything I found wanting, but as I recall, GIMP lacks both macros and batch editing, the former letting you record a set of actions to a hotkey so you don't have to repeat them yourself all the time, and the latter letting you apply a set of actions to hundreds or thousands of images at once. I would literally have to spend hundreds of hours to do things in GIMP that can be done with no effort in Photoshop, to the point where it would actually be easier to just program something myself from scratch than it would be to use GIMP, if Photoshop didn't exist.
I see that GIMP has since gotten a UI revamp, but the multiple window UI from the time I used it was also unbearably bad and one of the main things that sticks out in my memory.
Have you looked into script-fu? It would probably be a very steep learning curve.. BUT there is an opportunity to do something impossible 10 years ago, and that is to use AI and an external application. BATCH-FU is one such attempt but it seems to be a 'select action from a menu' thing.
But Gimp developers: implementing batch in one go is a big ask I know. But a great first step might be to create a channel in Gimp where correct script-fu is emitted for operations in progress. Being able to connect to that from outside would allow 3rd party projects to assemble "record by doing" macros that could be turned into Photoshop-like batch capability.
Macros are on the roadmap (https://developer.gimp.org/core/roadmap/#macros-script-recor...), and in fact we did a lot of prepwork for them during 3.0's development (internally, several features like filters and plug-ins now have configs that store settings, which will be used by macros in the future to repeat operations).
I would guess you don't need to start from scratch, just take the functionality, fork and put a Photoshop-like UI on top of it. That would already be so much better.
As an avid GIMPer for ~12 years now, I hate the UI. It's only fine because I've struggled through it for so long and now I know where and how things are.
But it's really poorly designed and outdated. I completely understand and sympathize with anyone trying to use GIMP for the first time.
For DOS, IMO, it's overkill. DOSBox-X does a very good job even for late and heavy dos games and is far more performant. A big advantage of DOSBox is not needing to setup a real OS inside the emulator - things just work.
For Windows things are the opposite, however. 86Box's better emulation of real hardware makes it far easier to setup the drivers and in general make the OS work well (on dosbox there are quite some quirks last time I checked, essentially requiring you to follow a specific guide, tweak some settings etc; on 86box it's just good old "install the os, put on the drivers and you're good to go"). Also, I notice that 86Box vms tend to be considerably faster than real hardware of the same level (likely will not be important for most games).
Note that this tends to require specific license exemptions. In particular, GCC links various pieces of functionality into your program that would normally trigger the GPL to apply to the whole program, and for this reason, those components had to be placed under the "GCC Runtime Library Exception"[1]
FOSS code is the backbone of many closed source for-profit companies. The license allows you to use FOSS tools and Linux, for instance, to build fully proprietary software.
Well, if its GPL you are supposed to provide the source code to any binaries you ship. So if you fed GPL code into your model, the output of it should be also considered GPL licensed, with all implications.
Sure, that usage is allowed by the license. The license does not allow copying the code (edit: into your closed-source product). LLMs are somewhere in between.
Be honest, most Software people find utility in artifacts which are a mysterious black box with an emulated abstraction.
During a career role most have no idea "why" chips were designed and built a certain way, nor require this information to work within abstract domains.
In many ways, vibe-coders are the absurd optimization of a naive trajectory toward zero workmanship standards. =3
> In Latin America, many people take on masters and PhD while living with their parents. You are often seen as smarter than the idiot who's working.
In Latin America a very small minority of young people even get to go to a proper academic institution and not just a quasi-degree mill college. For those going to somewhat reputable institutions with post-tertiary programs it's another small minority that gets to a masters degree, with even fewer getting into a doctorate track...
Quantify "many people" because it's absolute bullshit it's any kind of representative cohort of the population with the means to achieve this.
One of my dream games is a truly open world text adventure. I got a glimpse of it by having ChatGPT run this game, but it started hallucinating and misremembering after a few rounds. It has to be perfect to avoid breaking the immersion, but I'd pay $100 for such a game even without graphics.
Isn't this what MUDs are? I tried a few in the early days of the internet and even back then they were like much bigger and more dynamic versions of text adventures of the 80s. For me I bounced off the idea that I had to role-play with other humans - I thought it was far more interesting to chat with other humans about real-world topics - but if you are looking for a large, text-based role-play experience then it's probably worth trying out a few. There might even be some that can be soloed these days, there are so many.
I think the challenge of trying to make an "endless" game using an LLM is the same challenge that all procgen games face - they are boring for people who are seeking a well-paced narrative. There are players who enjoy the mechanics of looting/crafting/trading/etc who will gladly play games where the story is incidental or emergent, but if you're specifically looking for something with a bit more narrative depth, I'm not sure procgen will ever work. Even if there is a system that tries to project coherent storylines onto the generated world, you still need the player to do things that fit into a storyline (and not break the world in such a way that it undermines the storyline!), otherwise the pacing will be off. But if the system forces the player into a storyline, then it breaks the illusion that the world was ever truly open. So you can't have it both ways - either there is a narrative arc that the player submits to, or the player is building their own narrative inside a sandbox.
AAA games try to have it both ways, of course, but it's always pretty clear when you are walking through procgen locations and leafing through stacks of irrelevant lore vs when you are playing a bespoke storyline mission that meaningfully progresses the state of the world.
What I wanted in MUDs was a simple editor to allow people with little technical skill a means to create a world—or extend an existing one. And then I wanted a way to join MUDs together—like if you leave a forest by a certain path you are, unbeknownst to you, rerouted to a different MUD that picks up where the forest left off.
In this way I imagined in time a world larger and richer than any that had come before it—where you could really just keep going, keep playing, never see all of it.
I never got deep into it, but I remember reading magazine articles back in the 90s that that's exactly what the new generation of MUDs were. Wiki has pages on MOO, TinyMUCK, MUSH etc - these are basically platforms where the players themselves can expand out new objects and locations, presumably in a similar way to Second Life or other MMO sandboxes do today.
So the tools already exist, but it seems to me that they primarily appeal to a very specific type of gamer, one that doesn't have much overlap with the type of gamer who would like an "endless" open world or the type of gamer who would like a tightly-plotted narrative experience. I think it's more something that appeals to fans of table-top RPGs, people who are looking for a collaborative storytelling environment.
I think many gamers have the imagination of an epic infinite metaverse style game, but then when they actually get the opportunity to participate in one, it turns out that that's not really what they wanted after all, because it requires a level of creative labor that they weren't expecting. This is why I think the market has naturally segmented into sandbox builders, survival/roguelikes, traditional narrative adventures etc.
My experience was that in practice all that mapped-out world of most social mu*s was largely ignored by players; they'd all end up in a few gathering spots, or in private spaces disconnected from the main map, open only to their owners and people they teleported in.
MUDs are a low-tech version of what I'm describing. It relies on other people being available and generally leverages the usual tropes with repetitive killing-based gameplay.
LLMs are limited today, but one day they may be able to provide the well-paced narrative you're talking about. The LLM would be a skilled fiction writer that would introduce interesting events as I explore the world.
If I decide to go to a bar and talk to random strangers, it could give me interesting life stories to listen without any action. But, suddenly, a mysterious man walks in, gives me a sealed envelope and departs without saying a word... What is in the envelope?
You can do this with regard to a MUD too, but typically out of character
and not every MUD would allow OOC chatting within the game world, as that
is disruptive to those players who seek immersion.
It seems to me as if you may not have found a good roleplaying MUD back when
you played MUDs. You may be missing out on that experience. I retired from
playing MUDs about 11 years ago permanently, but the in-world roleplay was
the only thing that was interesting to me since it was the creation of a
unique storyline potentially involving many other playercharacters.
I think I just don't really vibe with roleplaying in realtime with other humans, to be honest. I grew up trying to play tabletop RPGs (my dad was a DM and used D&D mechanics as a way to make storytime more engaging), but while I really enjoyed making up characters, I never had much fun actually doing a campaign.
The thing I love about computer games is that I can go through them at my own pace, pause whenever I like, hang around looking at a cool visual, go back to an old save and try something different, whatever. Multiplayer takes all that freedom away because everything has to progress on somebody else's timetable, which isn't as fun for me. Nowadays being expected to perform on a time limit just reminds me of work, which is the last thing I want when I'm playing a game.
It is my understanding that muds (and all the flavors of Mush in particular) can sort-of do it, by letting players create their own story through roleplay, supported by an extremely open (and often player-modifiable) world, as well as good admins / GMs.
That is more like "computer tabletop", however, and doesn't scale beyond a small number of players.
You're on to something. I tried this too, a few months ago, with offline Ollama/Magistral on Mac. "You're a dungeonmaster for a single player adventure game, with me as the player..."
It lost track of things almost immediately. But the foundation was there.
Maybe if we had a MUD-tuned model...
If it has an approximate way to track state, and a "pre-caching" method where it can internally generate an entire town all at once, room by room, so hallucinations are rarer... actually starts to sound like a traditional DM's method of world building for a campaign.
I've never played Avalon but it looks like a better text adventure. I'm not talking about hardcoded or randomized worlds, but truly reactive worlds.
In my experiment with ChatGPT, I was walking around in a museum (that was the scenario) and decided to flirt with a woman who happened to be there. The flirting was something I decided to do on the spot with no prompting from the AI. The woman had just been part of the room description up to that point. But it reacted to this new situation in a semi-realistic way, essentially creating a new "adventure" on the spot. I met her on the next day, brought a gift (and so did she), but then it started hallucinating... :(
It did for a long time, but depending on busy friends makes it so I can't play this whenever I want. My "dream" game is a single-player game I can play as many times I want without having to rely on others.
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