#crawler software

[anim-ttrpgs]

preview of what else i'm working on

coming to the patreon in a few weeks

[craftedcircuitry]

Joined the PirateJam on Itch recently as I wanted a change of pace, and here's a snippet of the gameloop progress(since I joined late xD). I think I'm liking the very lite management sim style so far.

I've been practicing a lot better code ideas(??? forgot the term xD) for more things to make my code more decoupled, like call down, signal up. It's been pretty eye-opening, a little spaghetti in my head but its been working well so far.

[madhogthymaster]

DEATH APPROACHES: How I Learnt to Embrace the Dread

Let Madhog tell you all about the latest outing from the maker of Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion.

Read it.

[smbhax]

From Wizardry Gold - music by Jim Laurino

[z2z-gaming-and-random-art-ai]

FromSoftware - Exploring Dark Depths Shadow Tower & Echo Night (1998)🏰👻 ...

Two more new IP's from FromSoftware in 1998 with the releases of Shadow Tower a first person dungeon crawler and Echo Night with FromSoftware's first foray into the horror genre with this first person horror adventure.

What is your favourite FromSoftware game.

For the first edition in this series check out the following short https://youtube.com/shorts/kWnCPOVJD38?si=14bNarZPrnwl8Qhy

For more video game related shorts check out this playlist. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFJOZYl1h1CF5oVPNNxPlLJPambfM5BIj

[omercifulheaves]

A Dark Journey Through Shadow Tower - Series Retrospective by Majuular

[trainsinanime]

The darkly ironic thing is that if you are worried about the recent news that someone scraped Ao3 for AI research, then you're probably vastly underestimating the scale of the problem. It's way worse than you think.

For the record, a couple of days ago, someone posted a "dataset for AI research" on reddit, which was simply all publicly accessible works on Ao3, downloaded and zipped. This is good, in a way, because that ZIP file is blatantly illegal, and the OTW managed to get it taken down (though it's since been reuploaded elsewhere).

However, the big AI companies, like OpenAI, xAI, Meta and so on, as well as many you've never heard of, all probably had no interest in this ZIP file to begin with. That was only ever of interest to small-scale researchers. These companies probably already have all that data, received by scraping it themselves.

A lot of internet traffic at the moment is just AI companies sucking up whatever they can get. Wikipedia reports that about a third of all visitors are probably AI bots (and they use enormous amounts of bandwidth). A number of sites hosting software source code estimate that more than 90% of all traffic to their sites may be AI bots. It's all a bit fuzzy since most AI crawlers don't identify themselves as such, and pretend to be normal users.

The OTW hasn't released any similar data as far as I am aware, but my guess would be that Ao3 is being continuously crawled by all sorts of AI companies at every moment of the day. If you have a fanfic on Ao3, and it isn't locked to logged-in users only, then it's already going to be part of several AI training data sets. Only unlike this reddit guy, we'll never know for sure, because these AI training data sets won't be released to the public. Only the resulting AI models, or the chat bots that use these models, and whether that's illegal is… I dunno. Nobody knows. The US Supreme Court will probably answer that in 5-10 years time. Fun.

The solution I've seen from a lot of people is to lock their fics. That will, at best, only work for new fics and updates, it's not going to remove anything that e.g. OpenAI already knows.

And, of course, it assumes that these bots can't be logged in. Are they? I have no way of knowing. But if I didn't have a soul and ran an AI company, I might consider ordering a few interns to make a couple dozen to hundreds of Ao3 accounts. It costs nothing but time due to the queue system, and gets me another couple of million words probably.

In other words: I cannot guarantee that locked works are safe. Maybe, maybe not.

Also, I don't think there's a sure way to know whether any given work is included in the dataset or not. I suppose if ChatGPT can give you an accurate summary when you ask, then it's very likely to be in, but that's by no means a guarantee either way.

What to do? Honestly, I don't know. We can hope for AI companies to go bankrupt and fail, and I'm sure a lot of them will over the next five years, but probably not all of them. The answer will likely have to be political and on an international stage, which is not an easy terrain to find solutions for, well, anything.

Ultimately it's a personal decision. For myself, I think the joy I get from writing and having others read what I've written outweighs the risks, so my stories remain unlocked (and my blog posts as well, this very text will make its way into various data sets before too long, count on it). I can totally understand if others make other choices, though. It's all a mess.

Sorry to start, middle and end this on a downer, but I think it's important to be realistic here. We can't demand useful solutions for this from our politicians if we don't understand the problems.

[mudwerks]

(via AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt - Ars Technica)

Building on an anti-spam cybersecurity tactic known as tarpitting, he created Nepenthes, malicious software named after a carnivorous plant that will "eat just about anything that finds its way inside."

Aaron clearly warns users that Nepenthes is aggressive malware. It's not to be deployed by site owners uncomfortable with trapping AI crawlers and sending them down an "infinite maze" of static files with no exit links, where they "get stuck" and "thrash around" for months, he tells users. Once trapped, the crawlers can be fed gibberish data, aka Markov babble, which is designed to poison AI models. That's likely an appealing bonus feature for any site owners who, like Aaron, are fed up with paying for AI scraping and just want to watch AI burn.

Tarpits were originally designed to waste spammers' time and resources, but creators like Aaron have now evolved the tactic into an anti-AI weapon. As of this writing, Aaron confirmed that Nepenthes can effectively trap all the major web crawlers. So far, only OpenAI's crawler has managed to escape.

[bigbigpixels]

Black Crypt (1992) by Raven Soft

Commodore Amiga

Black Crypt is an Amiga-exclusive role-playing video game and Raven Software's debut title (they would later make Heretic and Hexen with ID Software). The game is one of the few to use an extra half-brite mode, which doubles the number of colors on the screen and sometimes looks simply beautiful.

Like most dungeon crawlers of the era, including the genre-defining Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder series, Black Crypt is set in a fantasy world inspired by Dungeons and Dragons.

At the start of the game, you create your characters from scratch, although they must be a Fighter, a Priest, a Magician, and a Druid. You can name your characters, choose their profile picture, and give them a few extra skill points, but you cannot change their class.

A Sega Mega Drive version was in development but was never released.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Crypt

[fiore-firelily]

My silly little idea: gamers always say Dark Souls is like a metroidvania, but I'd say it's more like an old school dungeon crawler. So many of the cool things the game does with its secrets, world design, and exploration clearly draw influence from the design philosophy of dungeon crawlers more so than the character-ability-upgrade-centric design of metroidvanias. and this is will be my platform for gaslighting convincing from software that dungeon crawlers are still cool and popular so they make kings field 5 please make kings field 5

[jimquisition]

We’re at a point where Soulslikes really need to start differentiating themselves from the pack of medieval wasteland adventures. Much as I love them, unless they’re of standout quality, I’m likely not to notice yet more bleak mimicry of From Software’s entire aesthetic. 

If any kind of game has crabs in it though, it’s guaranteed to automatically have my full attention. 

Another Crab’s Treasure is a colorful, spirited, satirical adventure about a socially isolated crab and the perils of undersea gentrification. With a witty script and a cast of fun characters in a world that isn’t a desolate husk, it does a lot to stick out on a smaller scale. 

[the-monkey-ruler]

Minecraft (2009)

Date: May 17, 2009 Platform: Mac / Xbox 360 / PlayStation 3 / Xbox 360 Games Store / PlayStation Network (PS3) / PC / iPhone / iPad / Android / Windows Phone / PlayStation Vita / Wii U / Browser / PlayStation Network (Vita) / Xbox One / PlayStation 4 / Linux / Amazon Fire TV / New Nintendo 3DS / Nintendo Switch / Xbox Series X|S Developer: Mojang AB / 4J Studios / Other Ocean Interactive / Digital Eclipse Software, Inc. Publisher: Mojang AB / Xbox Game Studios / Sony Interactive Entertainment America / Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe Genre: Action-Adventure Theme: Fantasy Franchises: Minecraft Also known as: Minecraft Xbox One Edition / Minecraft Xbox 360 Edition / Minecraft: PlayStation 4 Edition Type: Crossover

Summary:

Minecraft is an open world, first-person, survival sandbox game, developed and published by Mojang. It was originally released in a pre-alpha state via the TIGSource forums on May 17, 2009, and was later hosted online for supported browsers before receiving a standalone release for PC, Mac, and Linux on June 30, 2010. The game would officially exit its Beta version on November 18, 2011, although major updates continue to be released. Since August 2011, a number of ports of the game have released for consoles and mobile devices.

Presented with a unique low-resolution "voxel" aesthetic (where everything is shaped using cubes), the game allows players to interact with a variety of different "blocks" in a procedurally-generated world. Along with both resource mining/gathering and item crafting (hence the game name), the game features exploration (with multiple biomes and locations), combat, and construction. In addition to the standard "Survival" mode, the game features a "Creative" mode that allows players to design environments with an unlimited amount of blocks at their disposal and no survival elements. The game supports online multiplayer and later supported numerous content packs (including new world/block textures and player skins, many of which are cross-promotions with other games and franchises).

Originally created by indie developer Markus "Notch" Persson (whose roles were later taken over by fellow indie developer Jens "Jeb" Bergensten), Minecraft was ported to numerous smartphones (originally known as Minecraft: Pocket Edition) and consoles (originally known as Minecraft: Console Edition, with the "Console" in the name being replaced by the console's name). On September 20, 2017, the game received a major "Better Together" update that merges the smartphone version with some console versions (including Windows 10, Xbox One, and later Nintendo Switch) together for a single multi-platform version (known as Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, with the original computer versions renamed to Minecraft: Java Edition) with all features accessible (including cross-platform multiplayer). Alternate editions include a multi-platform version for use in classroom settings (Minecraft: Education Edition), a cut-down version for small RaspberryPi microcomputers (Minecraft: Pi Edition), and a multi-platform version for use in China (Minecraft China).

The game has received a number of spin-offs, including the 2015 adventure game Minecraft: Story Mode (and its 2017 sequel), the 2020 dungeon crawler Minecraft: Dungeons, and the augmented-reality mobile game Minecraft Earth. As well, Minecraft's procedurally-generated sandbox elements would inspire many other games, in both 2D (such as Terraria and Starbound) and 3D (such as Dragon Quest Builders and LEGO Worlds).

Source: https://www.giantbomb.com/minecraft/3030-30475/

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOphBjAAxTo

[stoic--rose]

Oi Hilda sorry for sending so many asks but do you have any PS Vita recommendations?

Anything from HD ports to original software for the thing

oh hell yeah!!! i love the vita, its one of my favorite consoles!! :D

in terms of exclusives theres not much but ive still latched onto a couple of really great games. Tearaway is my go to, super fun and creative 3d platformer from media molecule thats fun to 100%. Gravity Rush is another great one, while i havent finished it i played a good chunk of it and its one of the most quality titles on the system, by far. if you want something super funky and unique, Open Me! is a really cool AR game where you solve 3D puzzle boxes by looking around them through the vita camera, and operating switches and dials on the touch screen. its kinda jank but i really love a lot of its ideas and think its very overlooked. theres also Touch my Katamari and Silent Hill: Book of Memories if you want some kind of trashy but still pretty fun games (touch my katamari is like basically good but book of memories? that game is WACK . they made a silent hill roguelike... still cool though)

the vita has a ton of great indie ports, some of my favorites are Knytt Underground, Super Meat Boy, Spelunky, Axiom Verge, and most importantly, Severed. Severed is unique bc the vita is one of the only places it can be played, aside from mobile phones, wii u, 3ds, and switch (handheld only). its a game all about making precise slashes on the touch screen, and the combat is extremely fun and unique because of that. the art style is also gorgeous, and its also a first person dungeon crawler, similar to the older megaten games, if thats your thing.

some other cool ports are Wipeout 2048, Plants vs Zombies, La-Mulana EX and Day of the Tentacle Remastered. its also worth noting that you can play basically every psp and ps1 game on the vita but if i went into those i think we'd be here all afternoon so ill cut myself off there. happy vita-ing dg !!! (also never worry about sending too many asks i am always happy to respond to them !!)

[archoneddzs15]

Super Famicom - Wizardry Gaiden 4 - Throb of the Demon's Heart

Title: Wizardry Gaiden 4 - Throb of the Demon's Heart / ウィザードリィ外伝IV ～胎魔の鼓動～

Developer: Sir-Tech Software / Access Co. Ltd.

Publisher: ASCII Corporation

Release date: 20 September 1996

Catalogue Code: SHVC-AE4J-JPN

Genre: RPG

Wizardry Variants Daphne has just been unleashed onto the world in the form of a dungeon crawler for your smartphone, so why not take a look at a rather older Wizardry title? In case you haven't figured it out, Wizardry Gaiden is a spin-off of the Wizardry series, making this game one of those old-school Western RPGs that tries to emulate pen and paper D&D by being excessively tedious and user-unfriendly. First-person dungeon crawling with inadequate navigational aids, frustratingly limited inventory, needing a game encyclopedia to know what stuff does, extremely obtuse puzzles, and an almost overwhelming variety of character build options. This game has it all, and firmly falls within "too tedious to play without a walkthrough".

[lynnbecks-mainblog]

The lore in most '90s FPSes: "Save Phobos from demons!"¹ "Avenge your friends by killing the evil god you used to serve!"² "Aliens have invaded and are trapping women in weird flesh cocoons!"³

The lore in the Marathon games: "Ok so they hollowed out a moon and turned it into a spaceship. There are biomechanical aliens invading said spaceship now, and the AI that opened the doors is now evil. Except sometimes he helps the player, and him being evil is nothing to do with the aliens; that's just something that happens to AIs in this setting. Also there's an elder-god trapped inside a star and it will end the universe if it escapes, and the entire premise of the third game is that you switch between various doomed timelines by finding secret exits in a surreal dream dimension. Also this entire franchise is a sequel to dungeon-crawler about exploring an ancient pyramid, and may or may not also be connected to Halo."⁴

¹Doom (Id Software, 1993)

²Blood (Monolith, 1997)

³Duke Nukem 3D (3D Realms, 1996)

⁴I literally only know about this because of the MandaloreGaming "Bungie Rabbithole" playlist.

[antagonistchan]

Touhou Tuesday Episode 8 is here- Patchy's Magical Maze! it's an Etrian Odyssey or Persona Q-style dungeon crawler with extremely well-crafted animations, honestly very charming writing, and it's an Alice/Patchouli game which is always a plus. also, we very seriously debate the question What If Scooby-Doo Had A Gun?

this also marks Week 3 of our Dating Advice Month. you may be thinking "oh wow, i didn't realize this was a whole themed month you guys were doing" and to that i say "yeah neither did we until this episode". we just realized before recording that this was going to be the third consecutive week of romance games, and the first was the first episode of January, we're kinda obligated to finish this now.

starting with this episode, i have two days to edit instead of just one. i miscalculated how much leeway that would actually give me, so there's a couple sloppy bits (the most noticeable issue to me is that i ran out of time to fix a couple sound mastering issues), but overall, the extra day of editing time gave me SO much more room to do a lot more ambitious stuff with my editing, and also more room to take care of myself instead of locking myself to my editing software for 24 hours straight.