34 replies
15h0m
I developed the isometric engine for this[0] video game in the 90s. I remember trying to figure out the algorithm to determine where the cursor was (converting screen x/y to position on tile, taking into account height of tile stack and the fact the tiles could be transparent) was a monstrous headache for some reason.
The sort of thing you'd solve in 30 seconds with Google in 2024.
The 2D tiles were rendered out of 3D Studio Max, and the characters were meshes exported from Max.
That’s awesome.
This is unfortunately becoming increasingly untrue, as the forums where stuff like that was posted are rotting away, and Google’s advertisement optimized result ranking neglects the long tail.
And to the extent it is still true, it’s because pioneers like you figured it out and shared their results!
To add to that, people (at least in my org) resort to ask "ChatGPT" for all sorts of questions. I don't share that sentiment, but oth, I never had trouble finding what I was looking for using Google. I agree though, it get's tougher with all that walled gardens.
I guess I'm becoming the old, grumpy "back in my days, we used Google!" type of guy.
Back in my days, Google worked. Now it is a waste of time. Someone that wants to hold himself to the notion that Google was/is good really looks like someone having issues getting old
Any alternative to Google?
Kagi (I'm a customer) works much the same way google did in 2010 or so.
I looked up Kagi and their sources include "AI" - do you know if one can turn this off?
Yes there’s a toggle to turn it off in settings. It’s a little AI summary box they sometimes show at the top of search results.
Yea trivially
As a customer of Kagi, it's better than the current Google but it's still not the Google of 2010. Google sponsoring irrelevant results is one thing, but the bigger issue remains: in 2024, creating a trove of worthless "articles" and optimizing the crap out of search result performance is a viable business model. Even if the SEO is done with mostly Google in mind, Kagi still picks up enough of this junk to be a nuisance. No doubt the same is true for all alternative search engines.
It seems to be responsive to which sites you want ranked higher/lower. For instance I have wikipedia pinned which resolves a longstanding issue google has had where seo is prioritized over relevancy.
Bing is ok for results, but tries to push too much crap on you - do you want to link to your microsoft account? We've got rewards for you, are you sure you don't want to link to your microsoft account? Have you tried our copilot AI? Do you want to switch to Edge as your default browser? Did you know you can link Edge to your microsoft account? Here's some news from a scummy right-wing tabloid paper on the home page that you might be interested in.
I think in the default windows setup, your bing searches are "integrated" with your user account in some way.
Look, I don't mind the top 2 search results being ads (if you make them visually distinct from the rest), but I don't want all the other crap.
Bing's engine through duckduckgo is better. The ads don't get in your way once you've learned to start reading at the third entry on the page.
Claude Sonnet 3.5
Bing is pretty much the next best engine, but also has targeted ads (albiet less intrusive) and IMO less relevant results without fine tuning. DuckDuckGo uses Bing's backend without targeted ads (but still uses ads). Kagi uses google backend but without Google's ad-optimized algorithms. But that's a subscription solution.
sadly your best "free" alteratives is going back to the days of smaller, specific communities, and searching through there. If the forum has a bad search, you go back to google but can then use Site:[website.com] as a filter to fine tune your results. .
weirdly enough, when asking for documentation/problem solving types of questions - chatGPT actually is a good alternative. you still have to double-check since you can't trust it... but you shouldn't trust random google results either, so that's not a big change.
it's kinda weird how the web has increasingly become optimized for bots - and filled with content created by bots... to the point where as a human you now need a bot to cut through all the bloated SEO bullshit and filter out what you actually want to know...
Kagi is solid
Yes, lots of them, but they are all just a matter of not giving all your search data to same company, non I know work better in this regard, in finding good forum posts or logs to answer questions you have.
Google still works for me, but you have to generously apply “tricks” like verbatim mode, double quotes, time ranges, domain filters, exclude terms (minus sign), include search terms that bias it towards forum results, and so on.
Google works very well as an alternative to knowing the exact link to something you already know exists and know how it's named.
But it has become very bad at _discovering_ valuable information.
I've become a paranoid link hoarder because of this.
I'm Pretty Sure these things are true in comparison to the past:
- There is much more high quality content on the web than was ever before.
- The signal to noise ratio is _much_ smaller.
- Search results are getting cluttered by SEO spam, some of which is straight up copying from organic social media style sites (forums, SO, reddit, Github issues etc.)
It's extremely hard to find good content, even though _i know_ it is out there. Sometimes it's even hard to find sites I visited before, but I only remembered vague keywords.
And this is true especially for content that is of educational nature or interesting punditry. You know, the stuff that comes directly from people who have expertise and have earned a grounded opinion.
This is why I'm hoarding links to all sorts of interesting things. It's not an efficient way to do it and I don't know if there's a more general solution here. Very unfortunate.
Maybe it would be neat if there was a place online people could hoard, archive, and share their link troves. I know I’d be interested in that. A lot of this type of content becomes unmaintained and rots badly.
I like the idea of collaborative curation of quality web sources. I think it's a fundamentally hard problem, but my hunch is that many people do this anyway in some form or another.
You could argue that the web is exactly that - each page curates links to other pages - that's why pagerank worked so well in the early days for search.
The problem is keeping the SEO bots out.
So the challenge becomes how to scale a collaborative platform while keeping out the bad actors.
Pinboard is a bit like this, but with little emphasis on the social aspect, and no maintenance.
Are.na is an attempt at this, and I think has built up a decent community around it. Basically link/file storage + ability to navigate to other people’s lists storing the same link.
I don’t think it supports auto-archiving, though you could probably use it in conjunction with pinboard for that.
Literally Reddit - the original version
I agree with your observations. The time is just right for a Google search killer. There might be some AI in it, but the fundamental goal should be a massive increase of the SNR of search results.
Kagi's done that for me. Most is prefiltered and setting some domains to never appear again sorts out remaining spam. No generative AI, would recommend. The SNR is amazing compared to google.
On the other hand like the sibling comment mentions, perplexity is great at digging out obscure stuff sometimes. Provide enough details and use the pro type search and you may be surprised.
For me, this has been perplexity.ai. Give it a query, it expands that into multiple queries (possibly chained depending on results) and synthesizes the results into an answer with citations.
I've been prototyping an isometric browser game, and the approach I took was to draw an explicit interactive grid of divs on top of the isometric tiles with CSS affine transforms to get each to fit its respective tile surface dimensions. OnHover, et. al. follow this transform perfectly.
It took me a while to get the transform figured out, but once you do you are basically done for an entire tile set. This is also robust to vertical/horizontal overflow of tile art. The browser gives you reasonable ways to get at the various coordinate systems. You can either take the screen space coords directly or inverse transform them to get the orthographic (i.e. purely top-down) tile coords.
Modern web browser tech is really something to behold. It's maybe the best game engine if you hold it right. There are some crazy things you can do in the browser in 5 minutes that are completely infeasible everywhere else. For example, what if some of the tiles are x264 video files and not just static PNGs? What if we also mix in tiles that are drawn using webgl/canvas at each frame update? We could have the client itself handle rendering of tiles using scene descriptions received from the server.
Theres so many abandonware isometric games from the 90s and 00s that I’d love to see ported into browser based games.
I had a pet project for a while where I was extracting all the assets from Lineage 1 so I could try to recreate it.
I’ve implemented this in my own games and I remember that the solution was basically raycasting. But it was NOT some 30 seconds thing. It was a major effort anyway.
(There are of course other options, like rendering a picture with a different color for each object, and sampling the color to figure out what you clicked on. And “color” may just be a 1-channel integer object ID.)
I vaguely remember having played this game or a demo of it. I remember it being so difficult (or maybe I did not understand it) that I stopped playing after a while being frustrated. The dark and squishy atmosphere is great though!
Really cool music on the "character screen" (~6:33). Takes me back.
Oh man, I completely forgot about that game.
Absolutely loved it as a teen!