thanks! short answer is no, a reload doesn’t fix it. when the browser source comes up mute the page is actually fine, the audiocontext is running and even a test tone from the debugger never reaches the obs meters, so it’s obs, not the game. reloading or toggling “control audio via obs” didn’t help, only a full obs restart does. funny part is it fails on alternate starts, I measured 12 in a row and it was mute, sound, mute, sound. so the watchdog reads the meters for a few seconds and if the peak is under -60 dBFS it treats it like a black screen and restarts obs. and yeah the dwell idea is good, I’ll steal that

hey Tower, late follow up but you were right and it’s done. the ? button now has a SEE THE RULES button right under the welcome, it’s a plain manual with 8 short questions and the real numbers, and those numbers come straight from the game code so they can’t go stale when I change something. thanks for actually playing and saying you had no idea what was happening, that one comment changed more than any stat I was looking at

thanks, it’s the first number I look at every morning lol. one thing I learned this week is that you have to clean it before trusting it, a crawler from some chinese cloud providers was keeping the cookie and coming back, it was 6 of the 7 “visitors” one day. so the real number is smaller than it looked, but at least now it’s honest

thanks, means a lot after how the last thread went lol. honestly it’s still early to say if it worked, the number I’m watching now is how many people who paint on their first day come back another day, if that one moves I’ll know the card and the siege clock did something.

both, kind of. the part that actually erases stuff is plain game AI, rules and a budget: it finds groups of 25+ connected pixels, announces a siege on one, closes a ring around it, and if people don’t keep the ring lit it eats the work. all deterministic code. on top of that, every 15 min a small LLM (gemini flash lite through openrouter) gets the state of the board and picks which of the legal moves to make, which work to siege and when, and the code clamps whatever it answers, it can’t break the rules. it also writes a one line reason that goes in a war log on the site, that’s the only generated text players see. everything she says in the game and on the stream comes from a bank of lines I wrote by hand, and nothing on the canvas is generated, it’s all people painting. if the LLM is off, a fixed set of rules plays instead

thanks, this is pretty much where it went after that post. the end of a visit now shows a small card with what you lit, what she took back and how much of it is still standing, and the siege got a visible clock, the ring closes first and the assault comes 30 min later so you can see it coming while you’re still there. and whatever you paint in your first two hours she can’t touch for 24h, so when you come back there’s still something of yours. too early to know if it works, the numbers are still tiny, but “reads as a challenge instead” is exactly what I was trying to get to

Hello Tower, I will try to create a page where the mechanics of it, the machine, are clearly explained. Now I try to explain it here: She thinks every 10 seconds. She is reconquering based on a budget, but it is enhanced if people draw more. Every 15m the LLM chooses a larger target to turn off its lights. She advances along her border but if a player reconquers she can go after him with more determination. It must be taken into account that a painted light has a protection of 72 hours, only a declared fence can with it. I hope I have explained a little more to you. Anyway, I’m going to try to implement that more clearly in the game. If you have any more questions, tell me and I’ll answer you.