Introducing myself.

[larrydgraysdz]

I'm a developer that has been working with coding since mid 1980's. I have both Outpost and Outpost II on DVD somewhere in storage. I spent many hours late 90's and early 2000 playing these.  I found this turn based game and installed it. I like it and want to help out. So, I know C, I know Java extremely well and I know Claude Code fairly well. I think I can help. I love the turn-based genre games too. I've cloned the code, compiled it and run it. I have started a fork repo at github.com/larrydgray

My first thought when playing it was, "sound!"

Sourcing space-ambient music without licensing headaches

OpenGameArt.org ? filter by "Ambient"/"Space", most tracks are CC0 or CC-BY, made specifically for games like this.
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) ? huge catalog, CC-BY (just needs attribution in your credits, which this repo already has a spot for).
Sonniss GDC bundles (sonniss.com/gameaudiogdc) ? free, no-attribution-needed SFX/music packs released for GDC each year, heavily used in indie/fan games.
freesound.org ? best for one-shot SFX (mining, construction, alerts) rather than full ambient tracks; check each file's specific CC license (varies per upload).

I am thinking Mars maybe fading in and out. Maybe timed with certain events or just randomly sometimes. But adding a few others that theme well.

And definitely female AI voice. Kokoro-82M is what Claude recommended. Why it fits best here: both the engine and all 54 voice presets are Apache-2.0 licensed ? one license covers everything, so there's no per-voice license auditing needed before you commit generated files into a BSD-3 repo. It's tiny (82M params, runs fine on CPU, no GPU needed) and currently rates highest quality (MOS 4.2) among lightweight local TTS models, with several American/British female presets (af_heart, af_bella, bf_emma, etc.) that would suit a game advisor/CMO voice.

And some beginning prioritized UI sound effects and event sound effects.

Let me know your thoughts. thanks.

[leeor_net]

Hello and welcome!

Thanks for your interest! As a note, I really hate generative AI and refuse to allow it to touch any of the code and for sure will not allow any art assets (including sounds/music) into the project.

That stated, I've looked around on OpenGameArt.com for awhile and have some tracks other than Mars that I want to include in the game (the planet select screen is an example). I haven't added them yet as it's been a low priority and I wanted to avoid increasing the download size until it's closer to ready for real play time.

For the AI voices, I was planning on hiring local students to record voice lines for the AI using a recording studio available at the local community liberal arts college. It's a moderate fee, something I can afford but I don't have the script yet since the game isn't really finished. When I have a good idea of what lines the AI voices should be saying I'll be having real people voicing the AI lines. Side note -- in the beginning of the project circa 2016 I had some computer generated ai voices and they really sucked so I removed them because they weren't helpful and the rate of change was so high that I opted to wait until I had a better idea of what was actually needed for voice lines.

[Hooman]

Reading the first post I found myself thinking Leeor is not going to be a fan of AI generated content. Not too surprised by his response.

For code changes, I would be uncomfortable with vibe coded submission. I have a very strong preference for small change sets that are easy to understand and review. That tends to exclude a lot of vibe coded output. A lot of AI generated code can be overly verbose, sometimes unnecessarily complicated, and of highly variable quality. Combine that with how quickly AI tools can produce a large quantity of code, and it creates a situation where proper review can become very difficult. I'm generally of the opinion that code submissions should be well understood by the person submitting them, and should be readily understood by a reviewer. Mostly I want conditions where review is easy and quality can be maintained.

To be clear, my objection here isn't really about using AI tools for a research and learning phase, or a prototype phase. My concerns are more about quality and understandability when it comes time to present and review code.

There was someone who vibe coded some prototype UI upgrades. I would say that effort was appreciated. People did go over the visual changes to comment on them, and note which changes would be good improvements to make.

Those vibe coded UI upgrades were never formally submitted for inclusion. The person who made the UI changes left a link to his fork for anyone curious, though there was never a detailed review, nor was a PR opened for the changes. The focus was more on the general ideas for UI updates being presented, rather than on the code.

Given your stated background, I'm guessing you'd be more interested in code submissions. We do certainly like quality code submissions, and are generally happy to work with people that want to give it a try, or learn something new.

[Vagabond]

Welcome larrydgraysdz!

leeor, Hooman, maybe it is time to write some sort of AI coding expectations for contributors. It is difficult since the technology is new & changing so quickly. I would agree with understanding the code being submitted. I use AI frequently in my workflow now and would have used the tool for assisting in contributions to OPHD before reading this post.

If the stance is to refuse to allow AI to touch OPHD source code, that should probably be explicitly stated before anyone puts time into a PR to be rejected on developer principles instead of content...

Tough subject.

~Brett

[Hooman]

I don't know that I would go so far as to say no AI code.

I think my concern is more about quality. If something is vibe coded, then presumably it's never even been looked at, so is highly likely to have quality issues. There's also the potential for AI slop, which maybe has been looked at, but no real effort was put into producing good code, merely code that seems to work.

AI tools enable low effort submissions. It then takes effort on our end to review those submissions. I want to avoid a scenario where we end up spending substantially more time reviewing code than the submitter spent producing it. If code is bad and needs to be rejected, it may end up being a net negative contribution since time spent reviewing it was not spent doing something else productive.

AI tools also enable submissions from people who maybe don't have the skills to review the code themselves, or assess it's quality. This might still have uses for prototyping a feature to help with design, though maybe the prototype code is throw away.

AI tools might also be used to do well understood changes in a more automated way. Maybe a refactor requires search and replace like edits with some slight adjustment that's not easy to express directly with search and replace. Such a use would be more like a refactoring tool built into some IDEs. I'm not concerned about someone having typed the changes themselves. I'm more concerned that they understand and have reviewed the changes.

I don't wish to discourage people from tinkering, or learning, or sharing prototype ideas. If AI tools help people with that, than have at it. It's more that if people are submitting something for direct inclusion, I would want them to understand it, and stand by it. In a way, I feel like code being submitted should be something they could have written themselves, possibly after doing some research.

That and I would like my time respected. I'm quite willing to spend time with people who want to learn, and have put in some effort themselves. I don't necessarily want to spend a lot of time on contributions that someone put little to no effort into, and has little interest in learning from or improving.

Anyway, I hope that clarifies my stance a little bit. Maybe Leeor has a different take.

I suspect Leeor might also be concerned about copyright issues, and AI tools being trained on and basically ripping off other people's work. That's something I would probably be more conscious of for game assets.