It’s a great joke, and like all great jokes it makes you think. [Søren Fuglede Jørgensen] managed to cram a 15 M parameter large language model into a completely valid TrueType font: llama.ttf. Being an LLM-in-a-font means that it’ll do its magic across applications – in your photo editor as well as in your text editor.

What magic, we hear you ask? Say you have some text, written in some non-AI-enabled font. Highlight that, and swap over to llama.ttf. The first thing it does is to change all “o” characters to “ø”s, just like [Søren]’s parents did with his name. But the real magic comes when you type a length of exclamation points. In any normal font, they’re just exclamation points, but llama.ttf replaces them with the output of the TinyStories LLM, run locally in the font. Switching back to another font reveals them to be exclamation points after all. Bønkers!

This is all made possible by the HarfBuzz font extensions library. In the name of making custom ligatures and other text shaping possible, HarfBuzz allows fonts to contain Web Assembly code and runs it in a virtual machine at rendering time. This gives font designers the flexibility to render various Unicode combinations as unique glyphs, which is useful for languages like Persian. But it can just as well turn all “o”s into “ø”s or run all exclamation points through an LLM.

Something screams mischief about running arbitrary WASM while you type, but we remind you that since PostScript, font rendering engines have been able to run code in order to help with the formatting problem. This ability was inherited by PDF, and has kept malicious PDFs in the top-10 infiltration vectors for the last fifteen years. [Citation needed.] So if you can model a CPU in PDF, why not an LLM in TTF? Or a Pokemon clone in an OpenType font?

We don’t think [Søren] was making a security point here, we think he was just having fun. You can see how much fun in his video demo embedded below.

To say that Tandy’s TRS-80 Model 100 was an influential piece of computer hardware would be something of an understatement. While there’s some debate over which computer can historically be called the “first laptop”, the Model 100 was early enough that it helped influence our modern idea of portable computing. It was also one of the most successful of these early portables, due in part to how easy it was to write your own software for it using the built-in BASIC interpreter.

But as handy and capable as that integrated development environment might have been, it never produced anything as impressive as this Baldur’s Gate III “demake” created by [Alex Bowen]. Written in assembly, the game’s engine implements a subset of the Dungeons & Dragons Systems Reference Document (SRD), and is flexible enough that you could use it to produce your own ASCII art role-playing game that can run on either a Model 100 emulator like Virtual-T or on the real hardware.

Don’t worry about not having enough experience with the Model 100’s hardware to conjure up your own fantasy adventure. Assembly is done through zasm, and even though the code is intended for the 8085 CPU used in the Model 100, it’s actually written in Z80 syntax. The assembler’s support for mapping unicode characters also allows you to get a serviceable preview of what the levels will look like on the Model 100’s display right inside of your editor.

As you might imagine, getting such a complex game running on the meager hardware of the Model 100 took considerable trickery. [Alex] goes into plenty of detail in the project’s documentation and the video below, but perhaps our favorite optimization is the text compression routine. A Python script ran through all of the text strings used in the game to identify the most commonly used character sequences, and then mapped them to values which could be used to piece together words and sentences. This saved approximately 1500 bytes, which might not sound like a lot to a modern game developer, but it’s much appreciated on a machine that’s only got 24 kilobytes of RAM to begin with.

We’ve seen a number of projects featuring the TRS-80 Model 100, but most of them involve ripping out the original hardware and replacing it with something modern. That said, if you’ve got a stock Model 100 and give this technical masterpiece a shot, we’d love to hear about it in the comments.

[Will Cogley] makes eyeballs; hey, everyone needs a hobby, and we don’t judge. Like all his animatronics, his eyeballs are wondrous mechanisms, but they do tend toward being a bit complex, especially in terms of the fasteners needed to assemble them.

But not anymore. [Will] redid his eyeball design to be as easy to assemble as possible, and the results are both impressive and instructive. His original design mimics real eyeballs quite well, but takes six servos and a large handful of screws and nuts, which serve both to attach the servos to the frame and act as pivots for the many, many linkages needed. The new design has snap-fit pivots similar to Lego Technic axles printed right into the linkage elements, as well as snap connectors to hold the servos down. This eliminates the need for 45 screws and cuts assembly time from 30 minutes to about six, with no tools required. And although [Will] doesn’t mention it, it must save a bunch of weight, too.

Everything comes at a cost, of course, and such huge gains in assembly ease are no exception. [Will] details this in the video below, including printing the parts in the right orientation to handle the forces exerted both during assembly and in use. And while it’s hard to beat a five-fold reduction in assembly time, he might be able to reduce that even more with a few print-in-place pivots.

Según informó en exclusiva el sitio Dualshockers, parece que uno de los próximos proyecto del estudio Creative Assembly será un Total War basado en el universo de Star Wars.

Según el informe del medio, se están desarrollando un total de tres juegos diferentes de Total War y el de Star Wars aparentemente será el segundo en lanzarse. No está claro cuánto tiempo le queda al juego en desarrollo pero es poco probable que lance este año o incluso el próximo considerando que habrá otro Total War que se lanzará primero.

Tom Henderson de Insider Gaming se enteró por primera vez de un juego de Total War “futurista” a finales de 2022, y varias otras fuentes de segunda mano se acercaron al insider desde entonces y afirmaron que efectivamente el juego en cuestión está basado en el universo de Star Wars.

Actualmente, Creative Assembly está desarrollando una gran actualización para Total War: Pharoh, mientras que sus otros proyectos no se han anunciado oficialmente luego de la cancelación de Hyenas (un shooter de extracción tuvo varias alfas) y otros proyectos no anunciados. A finales de 2023, SEGA anunció que las cancelaciones de algunos de los proyectos de Creative Assembly y las reducciones de personal tenían como objetivo “reducir varios costos”.

El desarrollo de un Total War de Star Wars es algo que los fans de la serie Total War venían pidiendo hace años. De hecho, hay numerosas mods para muchas entregas de la serie, incluidos uno para Rome: Total War.

Acerca de Total War

Con más de 42,5 millones de copias vendidas, Total War es una de las series más consolidadas y aclamadas por la crítica en el sector de los videojuegos. La pasión por el rigor histórico y la calidad excelsa de sus productos ha propiciado que esta franquicia sea una de las más reconocidas en la historia de los juegos de PC.

Además de los títulos principales de corte histórico, la serie Total War se ha ampliado para ofrecer juegos para móviles free-to-play (Total War Battles: KINGDOM), epopeyas de fantasía (Total War: WARHAMMER®) y títulos dedicados a eventos históricos concretos (Total War Saga: THRONES OF BRITANNIA).

Acerca de The Creative Assembly

The Creative Assembly Ltd. es uno de los principales estudios de desarrollo de videojuegos de Europa. Su fundación data de 1987 y tiene sedes en Sussex Occidental (Reino Unido) y Sofía (Bulgaria).

Creative Assembly, tras conquistar numerosos premios con sus títulos AAA, entre los que se incluye la serie Total Wa con millones de copias vendidas, continúa ampliando su impresionante cartera de videojuegos y acuerdos de colaboración con empresas de talla mundial, como Games Workshop en Total War: WARHAMMER y Twentieth Century Fox en Alien: Isolation, así como 343 Industries y Microsoft en Halo Wars 2.

Gracias a un extraordinario equipo integrado por más de 700 profesionales, Creative Assembly ha conquistado multitud de galardones, como varios premios Best Place to Work y los recientes reconocimientos BAFTA, Music+Sound y Develop Industry Excellence Awards.

La entrada Creative Assembly está desarrollando un Total War de Star Wars apareció primero en PC Master Race Latinoamérica.