this guy gets it! as I mentioned in another post, yes the trajectory line is instantaneous, and you need to rely on your internal electrical meat estimator to predict how that trajectory evolves.
this was a known feature actually, to allow me to rapidly gain XP and unlock additional weapons, although I agree it shouldn't have made it to the " production" version, whose phrase I am using very loosely here.
that said, I strongly agree about the AI slop sentiment, the lack of thinking on the Creator's part. I am a huge type II fun person who generated a lot of personal satisfaction by struggling through software, hardware, and mechanical development throughout my career, and it is pretty disappointing to see what looks like the loss of that due to AI. I have great concern for the long-term stability and growth of our civilization to be honest. it reminds me of hg well's journey to the center of the Earth talking about the morlocks who are maintaining machines that they no longer understand how to build, or for what purpose they actually exist..
diatribe aside, I do appreciate all the feedback and I acknowledge I sent this out early, and without comprehensive testing.
I grew up playing scorched Earth on Windows 3 just over a thousand years ago, and have always enjoyed that game. here is my implementation using a circular world with basic orbital dynamics added. in theory it works on mobile as well, but is best intended to be a PC browser game.
in the interest of transparency, this was generated on qwen 3.8: 27b, so you should consider the "my implementation" loose at best.
I'd love feedback on what works and what doesn't.
some weapons, such as the laser satellite and the peacock feather have additional actions that can be commanded after the initial launch. for instance the laser satellite will shoot a laser in whatever the current orientation is, and the peacock feather will split up into multiple feathers when pressing the space button or the fire button again.
The shot timeout is the biggest issue for me. There's nothing worse than lining up the most crazy indirect shot and have it just disappear as it comes in.
The math on whether a shot is in escape velocity should be trivial for an AI to add. The only other degenerate cases would be some sort of orbit. My recommendation would be if the shot hasn't landed in 5 seconds, see if it's making progress, and if unclear, accelerate time until it is clearly making porgress (by 10x) and timeout at 60s world time.
* Moon is moving too fast, has too much influence.
* Movement breaks the game as you can just move up to the opponent.
* The timeout is frustrating. I can line up a shot that actually looks like it is going to be a direct hit just to have the game remove it as it starts descending towards the target.
Original Scorched Earth (which I also loved!) let you choose whether movement was allowed in the ruleset, and it was quite slow so you'd be up against the turn timer. Similar for Worms. I think it's a viable part of the game if nerfed or made riskier (mines?)
I think the moon gravity is a bit much. It would be cool to use the gravity of the moon in your attack, but I think that would require it moving slower and perhaps some prediction logic where you can see where the moon will be if you fire now?
I've built an iOS game (https://eveofimpact.com) years ago (an earth vs asteroids kind of thing) and I ran into similar problems where gravity was too strong, and trying to use gravity to your advantage was very tricky and unpredictable making it less fun. I eventually decided to just make it play a more "decorative" role.
yeah, a friend of mine and I were kind of laughing about how difficult the moon made things. on the opposite side of the pendulum, without the moon gravity, it would only take two or three terms to defeat the opponent, but I agree, toning down the moon a bit and coming up with future artillery path prediction might be more fun
I love the idea, but the moon has too much gravity and moves too fast, and the missiles too slow, which makes it impossible to aim. There's a fine line between complexity and chaos and this is on the wrong side of it right now.
If you want masses of people to be unable to think for themselves, be dependent on you for answers, and be unable to tell when you lie to them it's a very good idea to prioritize having an answer over understanding the steps needed to arrive at it.
The death of critical thinking. There are days when my sons have a hard time in school just because they ask questions, want explanations and to be given background. It turns out the current generation of teachers may already not be able to supply any of those.
As kids, we know what 4 is before addition is even mentioned. And we can count those 2 marbles and those 2 marbles and then those 4 marbles before learning the "+" sign.
If you think about it, we must know what 2 and 4 mean before we can learn what + means.
offloading thinking is a little/lottle bit different than writing to preserve your thoughts versus memorization. it's more analogous to skipping the writing, plugging your ears, and closing your eyes, while you wait for the answer to be presented before you.
This offloading was present even with pre-LLM googling. Sufficiently powerful search allows you to forget enough of the story to rely on imprecise recall. This is a form of thought atrophy.
I think this is probably what Socrates meant. He wasn't wrong, it's just that the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.
Even the "calculators make you forget how to do math" people seem antiquarian to me. But I totally get it when people talk about googling, and AI is another step change in the wrong direction.
To follow that arc backwards in time, maybe Socrates was right after all.
yeah, the centralization and concentration of knowledge and ability through reliance in this manner enables the teacher to escrow all your states pencils at any given moment for whatever reason.
once embedded i can see whole classes of industry dos'd.
logistics, dos'd.
it, dos'd.
military planning, dos'd.
medical, dos'd.
pay us this fee so you can update your nvidia drivers.
it's the unholy marriage of the surveillance and petrol states pushing this.
except you are missing the one versus many argument here. sure we could make one human much smarter, could we make endless copies with the same intelligence? no
For $100 billion we could pay ivy-league level tuition for a million people. You don’t think investing that much in education would yield some good research or companies?
