> Since this was mostly contained within one city (Detroit)
It's concentrated in Detroit but also distributed throughout the state, as you can observe in the census.gov slides.
The devastation is regional. It's been a wild experience, watching it all fall apart over the last 40+ years. The decay is immense and impossible to convey to someone from a rich state. Someone from the Eastern Bloc might get it, but I've never been able to communicate it to a Californian. Hop in a car and drive from town to town. Once-prosperous communities are boarded up and gradually reclaimed by nature. Department stores are converted into soup kitchens or marijuana dispensaries.
"Things will work themselves out" is not a law of nature, unless we broaden our definition of "things working out" to include outcomes like "everyone young enough flees, everyone else clutches their savings until they eventually die impoverished."
But with AI, even outcomes like that might be overly optimistic. Where will young people flee to? Where can they go, what trade can they learn, to be safe enough to eventually die in comfort?
When I look at Michigan I see both the past and the future, and I am planning accordingly.
I mean, I dont hate netcode for gameobjects, but generally I prefer to have the application just set up some sockets for me and I'll handle the rest myself, which you can do in NfG, but I've not used it too much. There was a really long gap between having working netcode stuff, and I wrote what I felt was a really nice layer over the top of the old LLAPI for a project I was going to work on, and then they immediately deprecated it.
Just a polite heads-up in case you weren't aware: for non-game usage of Unity, the licensing situation is... a little complicated. That goes for the engine as well as a lot of the stuff I've seen in the Asset Store. Just a thing to bear in mind, and potentially a reason to use a different engine.
The pro license at ~$2k/year per seat is all you need unless you are making a shitload of money. In which case, you are going to pay ~5k/year per seat.
Unless you intend to build "industrial real-time 3D applications like employee training, product configurators and embedded systems." In which case you must use the Industry License, for which you must pay "Custom pricing."
I last looked into the matter when considering RFP's for government contracts for VR software. Didn't feel like haggling with Unity's sales reps, especially since the government hasn't been the greatest client of late.
All of this is before you get to the Asset Store, which largely seems to assume that gamedevs are the customers. I'd rather not re-read the license agreement for every asset I've bought, but I know for certain that a number of them are explicitly games-only.
This reminds me of my experience trying to generate a reference photo for a 3d model.
I told Nano Banana to generate an image of the character with his feet shoulder width apart. It ended up generating him with his feet pressed together, so I told Nano Banana to widen his stance slightly.
It gave me an image of the man with his feet spread far apart enough to straddle a horse. I asked for a slightly narrowed stance and his feet were once again brought together.
This went back and forth unsuccessfully for a while until I asked, "I'm asking you to make his feet shoulder-width apart. Why are you ignoring me?" And Nano Banana confidently asserted that they are shoulder width apart, and I must be wrong.
Ultimately I ended up telling the model to render the same character, pinching a cantaloupe between his ankles, and then to remove the cantaloupe. It worked, but why do I have to trick Google's SOTA image generator to give me very basic stuff like this?
This has been my experience too. The new models don't spit out nightmare fuel as often, but they aren't nearly as creative either. They seem to be very good at creating stock photos and not much else
As a programmer I'd be happy with an API, so I can keep working in the environment I'm accustomed to. Programmers can get very picky when it comes to their ergonomics, so it would be wise to let them handle this part.
This, however, would be a significant obstacle to non-programmers. You might consider offering an in-game editor similar to Scratch or BYOB for people who want to dip into programming. It'd be a fun way for them to learn
It's concentrated in Detroit but also distributed throughout the state, as you can observe in the census.gov slides.
The devastation is regional. It's been a wild experience, watching it all fall apart over the last 40+ years. The decay is immense and impossible to convey to someone from a rich state. Someone from the Eastern Bloc might get it, but I've never been able to communicate it to a Californian. Hop in a car and drive from town to town. Once-prosperous communities are boarded up and gradually reclaimed by nature. Department stores are converted into soup kitchens or marijuana dispensaries.
"Things will work themselves out" is not a law of nature, unless we broaden our definition of "things working out" to include outcomes like "everyone young enough flees, everyone else clutches their savings until they eventually die impoverished."
But with AI, even outcomes like that might be overly optimistic. Where will young people flee to? Where can they go, what trade can they learn, to be safe enough to eventually die in comfort?
When I look at Michigan I see both the past and the future, and I am planning accordingly.