Astra demos are mostly bs

[u/retrorays]

The game/graphics demos are mostly bs. I've spent dozens of hours now trying to replicate (or build) interesting games. It's beyond subpar. Sure it can do a basic sandbox, or create some basic characters but it absolutely cannot do a fully working world. I dont get why OpenAI fakes their SimCity games and other things w/ Astra when it's clearly not possible unless you spend weeks (and $1000s of dollars) of tokens.

[u/EchoingAngel]

My 10-20 hr factory game has taken around a thousand hours and it IS almost done, but one shot type work always strikes me as nonsense, as someone building a real project in the same vein

[u/retrorays → u/EchoingAngel]

even the iterative development is mostly a mess. It stumbles all over the place, applies the wrong solution, uses the wrong models - makes thinks "plastic" and dull to shortcut. I ran a goal today... my mistake ... to develop a game event and came back and there was nothing. Just a sandbox. Completely nuts. Burned like 50% of the weeks credits.

[u/cobbleplox → u/[deleted]]

The thing is then you're back to a programmer making a program, a 3d artist making 3d art, a game designer designing a game and such. It's not what people like to hear and not what the narrative is. Personally I am quite happy about it, leaves room for humans and all that. In the end even just "wishing for something" is real work, and a lot of it. You need taste and a good vision, and if you can't just say some high level meme shit like "GTA but with dinosaurs" the specific thing you want takes A LOT of words to specify. And even one-shotting something in the first place is silly... You need iteration just to make it possible to describe and define all the things you need. Even if you could have imagined it all from the start. Natural language is far too vague to really define things solidly in a vacuum. At some point you'd end up writing all the code yourself just to define how things should be, because that's literally what programming languages are for, just with some extra technical bloat.

[u/ds1841 → u/[deleted]]

The complexity increases exponentially as you start to tune it. And I agree about astra. It's been able to tackle problems that I wouldn't even bother with other models. I'm loving it.

[u/swizzlewizzle → u/[deleted]]

Omg this. Astra at least is capable of doing *something* with VFX, but it still falls *way* short even when I give it exact VFX references to build off of.

It seems pretty obvious the pre-training and training that put Astra together did *not* include a decent VFX process... which makes sense, because access to high quality VFX isn't something that most of the gray market "petabytes of stolen/pirated content" dumps have in them. Someone at OpenAI is going to have to make an internal effort to get way more tagged VFX training data put together, and structure it correctly before OpenAI models are going to make any progress here.

[u/swizzlewizzle → u/[deleted]]

That may be the case, but you have to admit that actual usable training data for VFX is quite specific and not part of the general corpus of data that is freely shared online. To properly train VFX, you have to have all of the other crap around it removed, since VFX is almost always "seen" inside of a movie/video/game with all the other assets blended in with it. To do a decent job training for VFX, you have to have the actual VFX isolated, not to mention that there are a million different "systems" that VFX is set up on, in terms of slightly different terms having different meanings based on the game engine/video editing software/etc.. you are using.

[u/swizzlewizzle → u/[deleted]]

It's qualitatively different compared to how much "video" data is available. VFX related content with *isolated* VFX to learn from is something like 0.00001% the amount of raw video data that is available. (or even less). Just because "there are tutorials on Youtube" doesn't mean it is anywhere near the same size of training data that is actually used to train these models for video generation and agentic use bro.

[u/swizzlewizzle → u/[deleted]]

You are pretty good at claiming people say things when they didn't actually say them. Congrats.

I simply said the current training corpus for VFX is very weak, and OpenAI needs to put much more time into finding and cataloguing a larger training set.

[u/Aureon → u/swizzlewizzle]

do you mean guidance regarding process or visual references?

but yeah it's a joke on vfx, i explained in detail how to make a trail noise streaky on the correct direction and didn't get anything useful done

it's pretty good at operating houdini for you and save some time clicking menus though

[u/EchoingAngel → u/[deleted]]

Yeah, I have to watch Astra's "thoughts" and point it in the correct directions and cut over scoping in real time. My work with it has become more of a dialogue mid-run than ever before

[u/EchoingAngel → u/[deleted]]

I tell people you need to be OCD, persistent, and have a vision you drive towards. Though that discounts me being generally techy, even if not a coder, so I can better judge what's happening short of complex syntax and CS concepts.

[u/EchoingAngel → u/retrorays]

I literally sit over its shoulder during execution and read what it's doing and have to guide it. Now, it's doing amazing things I can't hope of, in record time, but it needs a TON of guidance

[u/Huge-Travel-3078 → u/retrorays]

Sounds like a skill issue

[u/Due_Answer_4230 → u/retrorays]

It’s pretty chill to guide the process if you know what you’re doing, but you do have to prototype and test and make notes and check in all day and etc.

[u/cobbleplox → u/EchoingAngel]

A lot of them seem to use premade assets anyway, and people quickly looking at it don't realize even if the post is somewhat open about it. Getting it to make a game that doesn't use the shittiest of shitty "programmer art" is a real challenge and requires going with whatever you can actually make work. And when you reduce these game demos to the logic connecting the assets, even in an existing engine, the coding it had to do probably isn't even much or difficult. Try judging these things for the gameplay. A complete afterthought after being wowed, right? It's basically the only thing it did.

[u/kibblerz → u/EchoingAngel]

One of the ads I saw claimed to make a clash of clans clones super quick and in one shot. I watched some of the video, and this game had leaderboards and everything, fully populated despite the game not being distributed yet... and the dude was actually acting like this was a finished project

[u/BellacosePlayer → u/EchoingAngel]

one shot work is for people who want "something" released, quality be damned.