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Month: January 2023

Major Valve Asset leak

Major Valve Asset leak

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It appears someone has leaked a massive Valve asset repository. This is probably the biggest leak since the 2003 source code leak for Halflife (git). Instead of source code, this time it appears to be a massive package of used, prototype, early, and discarded assets for Team Fortress 2, Portal, Halflife, Counterstrike, and several other big Valve games.

https://twitter.com/sylvia_braixen/status/1613404657803747330?s=20

Right now there is a big discussion going on at the VCC (Valve Cut Content) community discord server. They’re finding all kinds of crazy things in there, like prototype Counterstrike maps, female TF2 characters, and even some partially completed levels like this TF2 rocket-jump training map:

Update: It appears folks are now re-packaging the newly discovered maps:

cp_badlands_base_ik1

cp_PointBreaker:

Introduction to writing stable diffusion prompts

Introduction to writing stable diffusion prompts

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HowToGeek has a wonderful little introduction on how to start write your first Stable Diffusion prompts.

Update 02-2023: Here’s 10 really amazing resources to help you to generate really great prompts and art.

They start with some simple AI image generation and move on to more and more complex examples that includes a brief introduction to some key parameters, changing and including broader image sources, and then generating various famous artistic styles.

They finish out the intro with some links to help you learn more:

  • Lexica — a repository of images generated using Stable Diffusion and the corresponding prompt. Searchable by keyword.
  • Stable Diffusion Artist Style Studies — A non-exhaustive list of artists Stable Diffusion might recognize, as well as general descriptions of their artistic style. There is a ranking system to describe how well Stable Diffusion responds to the artist’s name as a part of a prompt.
  • Stable Diffusion Modifier Studies — a list of modifiers that can be used with Stable Diffusion, just like the artist page.
  • The AI Art Modifiers List — A photo gallery showcasing some of the strongest modifiers you can use in your prompts, and what they do. They’re sorted by modifier type.
  • Top 500 Artists Represented in Stable Diffusion — We know exactly what images were included in the Stable Diffusion training set, so it is possible to tell which artists contributed the most to training the AI. Generally speaking, the more strongly represented an artist was in the training data, the better Stable Diffusion will respond to their name as a keyword.
  • The Stable Diffusion Subreddit — The Stable Diffusion subreddit has a constant flow of new prompts and fun discoveries. If you’re looking for inspiration or insight, you can’t go wrong.

Links:

AI enhanced snowball fight – from 1897

AI enhanced snowball fight – from 1897

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjToVdbPxbw&ab_channel=OldenDays

Remember old-school movies that were damaged, in black in white, and everyone ran around at 2x speed? With AI processing, they can fix many of those problems. Olden Days youtube channel has a number of great restored videos like this.

Amazing to see that when fixed, this looks just like a snowball fight one might see today – proving that we aren’t all that different from the people of our past as we’d like to think.

These restoration techniques have come a long way in just a few years.

Other links:

Snow socks are better than chains

Snow socks are better than chains

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I am definitely sold on snow socks. Just like him, I couldn’t believe they were as good as chains. It seems so counter-intuitive. Yet, in some cases (like stopping distance), they are even better than chains. Snow socks are slightly easier to put on than chains too.

What’s nice about snow socks is that you can use them on bare pavement – unlike chains that often quickly get destroyed unless driving really slow. With socks, you can drive on bare pavement for a while until you find a safer spot to pull over to take them off.

I also found they were astounding on ice as well. The first time I used them, I was on a stretch of road that looked like glass. It was so slick I could barely stand on it when I got out of the car. I put the socks on, and drove without a single problem. Amazing. I will probably never go back to chains.

His video does a great job of comparing the two in actual conditions. His conditions were lots of fresh snow, but I can confirm on hard-packed roads and/or straight ice, they work just as exceptionally.

The only downside of socks is that they can get little holes if you drive on a lot of rocks or dry pavement for too long. However, in several years of occasional use, they are very small and do not affect the performance. Personally, I found chains only lasted about 2-3 seasons anyway – and socks cost just about the same; so I don’t see this as a big deal. If they get too shredded, I’ll just buy a new set.