Comment on Uniciv (open-source android/desktop 4x game) 4.17 release!

• Artisian@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Kozy asked for a different rule set; essentially changing a few numbers related to non-combat victory (shorter research times, lower policy points required, etc). Identifying these numbers in a complicated code base, especially for a non-programmer, could be very difficult. For the non-programmer, understanding how the code works isn’t very important. You just need to know what to change, and perhaps make sure you don’t change more.

  I think this is exactly a case where getting a novice programming friend to make a mod would make sense. Equivalently, to vibe code.

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  • echodot@feddit.uk ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    How would a novice programmer even know if the code that they’re writing isn’t breaking something else?

    I’ve tried getting AI to program really simple things, like converting street addresses into latitude and longitude coordinates, and the code it produces is just awful.

    It’s not ready at all for primetime yet, I really wish people would stop pushing it. It’ll get there I’m sure but it needs more time.

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    • Artisian@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      By testing it out in the app?

      I’ve also tried getting AI to program really simple things, like using js to find particular elements in a webpage (which I don’t control and involves far too many lines). It did fine.

      It’s not ready for commercial use, but it makes hacking around unfamiliar code more accessible. But hey, I’m too lazy to test this use case, so let’s keep arguing about it instead =) (though, thinking about it, automating the argument would be something the AI could do just as well, eh?)

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      • Artisian@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I’m going to make a mildly stronger claim. I think this game really is quite moddable by a non-coder. What you need is to implement a different ruleset with new win conditions; everything else can be done with copying existing files into the correct file structure. New win conditions are specified by a pretty boring JSON file, docs here:

        github.com/…/5-Miscellaneous-JSON-files.md#victor…

        See here for an MVP for a mod of this type (probably replaces/strips away too much, but you should be able to find the vanilla files in the github linked in the OP):

        github.com/yairm210/…/master

        Which is all to say, this is much easier than doing address lookup imo.

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