State of the Void – July 2023
This is the first State of the Void blog post, where I go over highlights and achievements of the previous month. For now, the primary goal for me is to have some accountability on what I get up to every month.
Technology – website revamp and AI
The big thing in July was the revamp of the website, something I planned to do a few times in the last year, but never really took the time for until now. I switched out the WordPress theme and removed the parallax homepage, which was the main reason I had the previous theme in the first place. It never worked that well on mobile and was more focused on visuals and images – which is not what the site is about and which is why the site had a lot of placeholders for a while.
I also experimented with AI art generation to create the Voidling creatures scattered about the website. I will need to do more experimentation, but so far, my experiences with AI are:
- It is pretty good if you have a general idea of what you want and it does not matter if it does not match up completely with your vision.
- If you have something specific in mind it is hard to get the prompts right to have the AI generate it. Maybe when I get more experienced with it, I can get more out of it, we will see.
- Consistency between images is spotty. Sometimes it works, but often it is non-existent. I have seen the same with language model AI. For example, when you have the AI describe a building and it is made of stone. Then you instruct the AI to go inside the building and suddenly the place is made completely out of wood.
More to follow as I experiment more.
Games
Two games jump out at me, Diablo 4 and Final Fantasy 16, for different reasons.
Final Fantasy 16 is a great game and I say that when I still have to finish it. They really nailed the action RPG gameplay. It feels like Devil May Cry only less crazy with the combos. It is even more of a departure from the turn-based roots of the series, but personally I don’t mind.
The story is brutal so far. I get the comparisons to Game of Thrones, both in tone and in visuals. The set pieces are great, like the cinematic battles against the Eikons, with seamless switches between cinematics and gameplay during those battles. And the soundtrack is simply amazing.
Diablo 4 on the other hand is a really interesting case of a mixed bag. I played some of the betas and wasn’t really impressed, but I bought the game anyway because I play Diablo 3 with friends every season for about a week. And it’s the playing with friends part where the fun lies for me.
So I got Diablo 4 and I enjoyed the initial experience of playing the campaign and afterward cleaning up in the open world, even though that is not something I want to do with every character and every playthrough/season. Really looking at the sub-stats of the gear took some getting used to and I feel the need for a build guide more here than in Diablo 3. For an action RPG like this I don’t really mind it and it’s not like it has the complexity of Path of Exile (which I never really got into). What I didn’t like is how the levelling slowed down to a crawl on higher levels, but since I was done with most of the game anyway it was fine.
Fast forward a few weeks and I was looking forward to playing the first season when Blizzard decides to release a patch, two days before season start, that manages to make every, single, aspect of the game worse. Everything! I still did the season start, but not with the whole crew. The battle pass was pretty easy to complete, but the free rewards are lackluster and the paid cosmetic rewards look nice on necromancers but for other classes feel really out of place. I still need to finish the last step of the seasonal journey, but it takes forever to do and that is not fun.
From a software developer perspective Blizzard revealed some interesting things about how the game works under the hood. For instance, they can’t give players more stash space for items because whenever you see another player you also load in their stash in your memory. Especially in the hubs where you see a lot of players, or around world bosses, this apparently creates quite a bit of memory overhead. It makes me wonder why they developed it that way.
Writing Stuff
On the writing front, a.k.a. butt in chair, hands on keyboard, this was an absolutely terrible month. I didn’t write a bloody thing. Unlike the June, when I finished the short story “Faceless in Vegas”. For August I need to do better.
