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We Put Claude Code in Rollercoaster Tycoon

https://labs.ramp.com/rct
127•iamwil•5d ago

Comments

nacozarina•5d ago
next up: Crusader Kings III
mcphage•1h ago
> You’re right, I did accidentally slaughter all the residents of Béziers. I won’t do that again. But I think that you’ll find God knows his own.
Forgeties79•1h ago
Paradox future hire right here
Deukhoofd•1h ago
Crusader Kings is a franchise I really could see LLMs shine. One of the current main criticisms on the game is that there's a lack of events, and that they often don't really feel relevant to your character.

An LLM could potentially make events far more aimed at your character, and could actually respond to things happening in the world far more than what the game currently does. It could really create some cool emerging gameplay.

Braini•24m ago
In general you are right, I expect something like this to appear in the future and it would be cool.

But isn't the criticism rather that there are too many (as you say repetitive, not relevant) events - its not like there are cool stories emerging from the underlying game mechanics anymore ("grand strategy") but players have to click through these boring predetermined events again and again.

khoury•1h ago
Can't wait for someone to let Claude control a runescape character from scratch
reactordev•1h ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/1qeh3nc/i_added_...

https://ubos.tech/mcp/runescape-mcp-server-rs-osrs/

ASpring•17m ago
People have been botting on Runescape since the early 2000s. Obviously not quite at the Claude level :). The botting forums were a group of very active and welcoming communities. This is actually what led me to Java programming and computer science more broadly--I wrote custom scripts for my characters.

I still have some parts of the old Rei-net forum archived on an external somewhere.

ideashower•14m ago
Wouldn't that break Jagex's TOS though? Is there a way of getting caught?
AstroBen•5m ago
I imagine Jagex must be up there with having the most sophisticated bot detection out of anyone. Its been a thing for decades
HelloUsername•1h ago
*OpenRCT2
skybrian•1h ago
Would a way to take screenshots help? It seems to work for browser testing.
joshribakoff•1h ago
I’ve been doing game development and it starts to hallucinate more rapidly when it doesn’t understand things like the direction it placing things or which way the camera is oriented

Gemini models are a little bit better about spatial reasoning, but we’re still not there yet because these models were not designed to do spatial reasoning they were designed to process text

In my development, I also use the ascii matrix technique.

miohtama•1h ago
They would need a spatial reason or layout specific tool, to translate to English and back
falcor84•45m ago
I wonder if they could integrate a secondary "world model" trained/fine-tuned on Rollercoaster Tycoon to just do the layout reasoning, and have the main agent offload tasks to it.
kleene_op•1h ago
Spatial awareness was also a huge limitation to Claude playing pokemon.

It really seems to me that the first AI company getting to implement "spatial awareness" vector tokens and integrating them neatly with the other conventional text, image and sound tokens will be reaping huge rewards. Some are already partnering with robot companies, it's only a matter of time before one of those gets there.

nszceta•52m ago
This is also my experience with attempting to use Claude and GLM-4.7 with OpenSCAD. Horrible spatial reasoning abilities.
hypercube33•53m ago
I disagree. With opus I'll screenshot an app and draw all over it like a child with me paint and paste it into the chat - it seems to reasonably understand what I'm asking with my chicken scratch and dimensions.

As far as 3d I don't have experience however it could be quite awful at that

lukebechtel•1h ago
> We don't know any C++ at all, and we vibe-coded the entire project over a few weeks. The core pieces of the build are…

what a world!

AndrewKemendo•1h ago
I would’ve walked for days to a CompUSA and spent my life savings if there was anything remotely equivalent to this when I was learning C on my Macintosh 4400 in 1997

People don’t appreciate what they have

lifetimerubyist•1h ago
It’s worse. They’re proud they don’t know.
risyachka•58m ago
Its like ordering a project from upwork- someone did it for you, you have no idea what is going on, kinda works though.
datsci_est_2015•16m ago
Great analogy. “I don’t know any C++ but I hired some people on Upwork and they delivered this software demo.”
yoyohello13•58m ago
Everyone should read that section. It was really interesting reading about their experiences/challenges getting it all working.
mentos•1h ago
The opening paragraph I thought was the agent prompt haha

> The park rating is climbing. Your flagship coaster is printing money. Guests are happy, for now. But you know what's coming: the inevitable cascade of breakdowns, the trash piling up by the exits, the queue times spiraling out of control.

azhenley•1h ago
Edit: HN's auto-resubmit in action, ignore.
Bluescreenbuddy•1h ago
What
eterm•1h ago
So, this link is actually 5 days old, if you hover the "2 hours ago" you'll see the date 5 days ago.

HN second-chance pool shenanigans.

hk__2•55m ago
> The only other notable setback was an accidental use of the word "revert" which Codex took literally, and ran git revert on a file where 1-2 hours of progress had been accumulating.
Filligree•35m ago
Yet another reason to use Jujutsu. And put a `jj status` wrapper in your PS1. ;-)
diath•18m ago
> Yet another reason to use Jujutsu

And what would that reason be? You can git revert a git revert.

westurner•5m ago
Start with env args like AGENT_ID for indicating which Merkle hash of which model(s) generated which code with which agent(s) and add those attributes to signed (-S) commit messages. For traceability; to find other faulty code generated by the same model and determine whether an agent or a human introduced the fault.

Then, `git notes` is better for signature metadata because it doesn't change the commit hash to add signatures for the commit.

And then, you'd need to run a local Rekor log to use Sigstore attestations on every commit.

Sigstore.dev is SLSA.dev compliant.

Sigstore grants short-lived release attestation signing keys for CI builds on a build farm to sign artifacts with.

So, when jujutsu autocommits agent-generated code, what causes there to be an {{AGENT_ID}} in the commit message or git notes? And what stops a user from forging such attestations?

_flux•28m ago
Amazing that these tools don't maintain a replayable log of everything they've done.

Although git revert is not a destructive operation, so it's surprising that it caused any loss of data. Maybe they meant git reset --hard or something like that. Wild if Codec would run that.

MattGaiser•25m ago
Claude Code has /rewind. Not sure if it is foolproof, but this has been tried.
fnordpiglet•53m ago
Interesting article but it doesn’t actually discuss how well it performs at playing the game. There is in fact a 1.5 hour YouTube video but it woulda been nice for a bit of an outcome postmortem. It’s like “here’s the methods and set up section of a research paper but for the conclusion you need to watch this movie and make your own judgements!”
cyanydeez•48m ago
I was told the important part of AI is the generation part, not the verification or quality.
Sharlin•42m ago
It does discuss that? Basically it has good grasp of finances and often knows what "should" be done, but it struggles with actually building anything beyond placing toilets and hotdog stalls. To be fair, its map interface is not exactly optimal, and a multimodal model might fare quite a bit better at understanding the 2D map (verticality would likely still be a problem).
nipponese•48m ago
> kept the context above the ~60% remaining level where coding models perform at their absolute best

Maybe this is obvious to Claude users but how do you know your remaining context level? There is UI for this?

neilfrndes•46m ago
Claude code has a /context command.
adithyareddy•44m ago
You can also show context in the statusline within claude code: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/statusline#context-window-us...
nipponese•22m ago
Follow up Q: what are you supposed to do when the context becomes too large? Start a new conversation/context window and let Claude start from scratch?
MattGaiser•20m ago
/context
equinumerous•46m ago
This is a cool idea. I wanted to do something like this by adding a Lua API to OpenRCT2 that allows you to manipulate and inspect the game world. Then, you could either provide an LLM agent the ability to write and run scripts in the game, or program a more classic AI using the Lua API. This AI would probably perform much better than an LLM - but an interesting experiment nonetheless to see how a language model can fare in a task it was not trained to do.
equinumerous•40m ago
As far as a scripting API, it looks like the devs beat me to it with a JS/TS plugin system: https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2/blob/develop/distributi...
neom•44m ago
Wonder how it would do with Myst.
haunter•41m ago
This is what I want but for PoE/PoE2 builds. I always get a headache just looking at the passive tree https://poe.ninja/poe2/passive-skill-tree
pocketarc•39m ago
I love the interview at the end of the video. The kubectl-inspired CLI, and the feedback for improvements from Claude, as well as the alerts/segmentation feedback.

You could take those, make the tools better, and repeat the experience, and I'd love to see how much better the run would go.

I keep thinking about that when it comes to things like this - the Pokemon thing as well. The quality of the tooling around the AI is only going to be come more and more impactful as time goes on. The more you can deterministically figure out on behalf of the AI to provide it with accurate ways of seeing and doing things, the better.

Ditto for humans, of course, that's the great thing about optimizing for AI. It's really just "if a human was using this, what would they need"? Think about it: The whole thing with the paths not being properly connected, a human would have to sit down and really think about it, draw/sketch the layout to visualize and understand what coordinates to do things in. And if you couldn't do that, you too would probably struggle for a while. But if the tool provided you with enough context to understand that a path wasn't connected properly and why, you'd be fine.

rnmmrnm•19m ago
this is cute but i imagined prompting the ai for a loop-di-loop roller coaster. If this could build complex ride it would be a game changer.
joshcsimmons•7m ago
Interesting this is on the ramp.com domain? I'm surprised in this tech market they can pay devs to hack on Rollercoaster Tycoon. Maybe there's some crossover I'm missing but seems like a sweet gig honestly.

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We Put Claude Code in Rollercoaster Tycoon

https://labs.ramp.com/rct
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