First of all, here is the episode with me in it, where we talked about Brood War AI. Go watch it, if you haven’t yet.

So this was a milestone moment for me, and the whole Brood War AI scene. It’s a niche within a niche, and it takes effort to even start to be in this scene. It was awesome to talk about our passion, and projects. I decided to wait a few days before I publish this article, as I wanted to digest the experience. My key takeaways are:

I have to commend the Pylon Show crew on organization, and handling everything – they’ve been excellent at setting it up, and making everything working. And of course, Artosis was an excellent, enthusiastic host, and the whole experience was a pleasant and rewarding one. I do hope we will return sometime!

To say that the AI scene is not well known is an understatement. People tend to know about AlphaStar, but have zero idea about the Brood War AI scene. Yet, Artosis was keen to point out that it has been around far longer. So certainly, we seem to suffer from a PR/marketing problem. This episode remedied a lot of that, but as once a man with big hair said, we’re halfway there.

I still feel that getting over the initial barrier of “wait this is AI?” is the hardest. After that, the reactions range from “this is very interesting” to “but they can’t beat humans, maybe noobs, but certainly not me because I’m grandmaster level and also i bench press 2000 pounds”. I welcome both ends of the spectrum, because at the end of the day, none of these are dismissive. The curiosity, the want to interact with the bots – even if just to prove something no one asked you to – is there, and that’s important.

The abilities of the bots are underestimated often. ZZZero’s stream was a bit misleading in this regard. Don’t get me wrong, he did an excellent job – maybe a too good one even, as he is a very good player, and won almost every match. That is in stark contrast with nice__usernme’s stream, who lost a lot of them.

And lastly, I held a stream myself, about SCHNAIL, a Q&A/showcase type thing. It’s just a state of the project, and what’s next summary.

Streaming, and being on camera is a new experience for me, especially the latter. The general consensus is that showing your face on streams boosts your number of viewers, and makes you more approachable. I’m not sure this holds true for coding/more technical things, but I don’t really have data on that.

My main gripe with streaming is it’s low density of information. I like to write articles, and make videos that explain a concept without much chaff, and that is impossible to do on stream, at least for me. The impression might be false, but it feels like I’m not using the time efficiently. Then again, I can do it at times when I’m too tired to code.

I guess I should add the live coding streams, and the experience with them here too. Coding is predominantly a solitary actviity, and even when working in pairs, you need to first estabilish a common language, and be able to follow each other’s train of thought. That’s already hard to do in person, it’s even harder to convey over stream, and make it entertaining at the same time. Although the coding videos were indeed popular, and well received.

This article is more of a pondering than anything – recently I’ve been working mostly on SCHNAIL, and the non-visible part of it. This is actively boring, not just to talk about, but to actually do in some cases, but it needs to be done. The so-called “grind” part, yay. The point is, I didn’t publish other articles about development, or the BWAPI guide. I find that fragmenting myself over many different projects makes me lose inertia, and be less effective at every one of them. The sum of parts is lesser than the whole, if you will. So for now, it is SCHNAIL full steam ahead. I do plan to write technical, and update articles about it, though! (I kinda did the two in one deal on that – maybe I should not?)

The conclusion here? Streaming is good. Good for me, good for the folks in my community, and good for some more informal interaction. I still feel that it is not time-effective, but hey, you can’t have everything.

And the usual closing paragraph. If you want to support the Undermind, the SCHNAIL project, or just this site, you can do so on Patreon. Every dollar helps – I can at least offset some of the hosting costs. Also, you can follow me on Twitter (Some bite-sized updates, and bad puns) or Facebook (Generally just updates), and maybe Twitch as well (speaking of streaming) – thanks for reading!