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Tank Body Problem

188 points · 54 comments · jimbooonooo

  1. isoprophlex · · focus · HN ↗
    You can just roll up to the other player and shoot them in the face?!
    1. philipallstar · · focus · HN ↗
      Real-life tank tactics are very viable in this game.
    2. rossy · · focus · HN ↗
      I know sometimes obvious things miss us, but there's a 99% chance that a human author would have realised half-way through implementing movement that it broke the game.

      Selfishly, I think my biggest fear of the AI future is everything will be like this. Previously, the existence of a game like this was proof that a human being was passionate enough to drag it into life. Now, there's this empty and slightly embarrassing feeling where if you think too much about someone else's creation, you might have put more thought into it than they did.

      1. bruce343434 · · focus · HN ↗
        Took the words out of my mouth. The trajectory indicator isn't predictive either, making it pointless. A single playtest would have made this obvious and maybe even a single prompt would have solved it.
        1. jimbooonooo · · focus · HN ↗
          correct, the trajectory indicator is instantaneous, requiring you to use your internal electrical meat estimator
      2. MarcScott · · focus · HN ↗
        I think it was on the Astra launch site, they had a car racing game authored by codex. I played it once and was quite impressed. I played it a second time and realised that I could just hold down the accelerator, not bother steering at all, and beat all the AI opponents every time. The game was pretty but pointless.
      3. jerf · · focus · HN ↗
        I see so many posts on programming reddits now asking for "brutal feedback" (which I see so often I suspect it must also be a 2nd-tier Claudism that only comes up in this context) with a commit history an hour and a half old, and my "brutal feedback" I want to give is have you actually tried using your code?

        I, too, have an AI, and I, too, have manifested a lot of stuff off of a single prompt. That first pass is generally pretty worthless. Amazing in its own way for what comes out from how little input, how quickly the amazing becomes banal, but still, pretty worthless in practice. I don't think there's anything wrong with "vibe coding" but you should definitely expect any product of it that is going to be worth a darn is going to require much more than 30 minutes of QA to be actually useful, even something as simple as a little caching library or something. And this won't change from AIs getting better in the future; it is a fundamental information theory problem about just how far the prompt can be expanded even in theory into a working program.

        This is not targeted at the OP, I'm just commiserating with you. This program does not correlate with my own experience with one-shot vibe coding, which is that I generally can't go literally 5 seconds without hitting an issue of some sort. I've spent weeks on an app for my kids and I started to measure my progress by "how long I can use it before I hit an issue". I considered it a bit of an event when I hit five minutes. It's hovering around 15 to 20 right now, but I've still got a ways to go before it is "indefinite".

      4. jimbooonooo · · focus · HN ↗
        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.

    3. mozzaa · · focus · HN ↗
      Player 2 hates this one simple trick
      1. Bigpet · · focus · HN ↗
        Player 2 probably also hates that he can't switch weapons unlike Player 1.
    4. moffkalast · · focus · HN ↗
      Yeah P1 wins every time, movement should be limited to like one tank length per round or something.
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