Show HN: Time Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed

> The videos aren’t always historically accurate to the last detail

Are they ever?

> They might incorporate elements of folklore or have details from popular beliefs about the way things looked rather than the latest academic research on how they looked

Like the one of the age of castles man loading an American civil war cannon by holding another cannon up to it: https://www.eggnog.ai/timeportal/37e02fea-bbb2-4b88-ae8c-0a3...

I must have missed that folklore.

Still more accurate most of the time than a lot of historical video games at least.

I got a trippy one that was supposed to be about Da Vinci painting the Last Supper, but the people were moving, so I thought it was supposed to be the actual supper: https://www.eggnog.ai/timeportal/56571c14-8f13-48ba-b60f-d82...

>Still more accurate most of the time than a lot of historical video games at least.

This game is much closer to Trivial Pursuit than it is Assassin's Creed. The importance of accuracy depends on the type of game and when the point of the game is specifically testing the player's knowledge, a lack of accuracy is game-breaking.

The inaccuracy was disappointing to me. If the point is historical trivia it's hard when the historical trivia isn't right. I have done some fencing and I noticed it especially for weapons and armor (though that might be just because that's what I know at least a tiny bit about).

Overall it's a fun idea though. I was able to consistently get pretty close in time and location so even with the anachronisms there was enough there.

And where the creators are on the spectrum between historical accuracy vs politics vs target audience; Asscreed is one that tries to balance it, sometimes it works, their most recent example has had major criticisms. Kingdom Come focuses on historical accuracy but since they found no records of e.g. Black people in medieval Bohemia they didn't include them in the first game, which did trigger some criticism - the game director being outspoken on the issue probably didn't help.

It's also a bit disappointing how much AI still deviates from what you ask of it. In one case, the prompt is (with spoilers removed):

> This star-lit scene in a [...] garden showcases [...] using a seven-foot reflecting telescope, with speculum metal mirrors, in 18th-century [...]. The [...] row house architecture, oil lantern lighting, and his period attire all pinpoint the late 1700s. The meticulously ground mirror indicates the telescope’s custom design that enabled this revolutionary astronomical finding.

The result is a picture (with some panning animation) of a guy who for some reason has a pistol in his belt, looking through a complicated-looking telescope that is however definitely not a seven-foot mirror telescope in broad daylight with an oil painting inexplicably hanging in mid air behind him. No starlight, row houses or oil lanterns to be seen.

It's like lighting one cigarette with another.

It's a really fun idea and a terrible example of applying AI to a problem. An average person with an internet connection is going to do a terrible job of getting historical details right, and the only thing AI is doing better here is generating artistic depictions of the mistakes faster than a human could.

This is an example of something that looks like an educational game but has the opposite effect. I had fun doing my round, but I won't do it again, because I think I will learn more wrong things from it than right things.

They did "fix it" on Kingdom Come 2 and personally think they did a good job about how the reaction would be when meeting a dude with dark skin on that specific time and place.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_OksWkD0VaY

The most recent example has had "major criticisms" because it centers a historical figure who happens to be black. (There was almost zero bellyaching about accuracy when the same figure showed up as a boss/side character in more fantastical takes on medieval Japan, including one in which he sics a ghost Atlas Bear on the PC.) There is a kernal of virtue wrt the issue of representation and appropriation, but most of the raging is driven by racism.

I do want to lend support to the idea that he series tries to balance accuracy with its gameplay/narrative foci, though. IIUC, they get a lot of details that Hollywood movies and even documentaries get wrong (by virtue of digital production). Origins and Odyssey included modes that allowed player to move through the world as if it were a living museum, reading passages about people and places as they were encountered.

Overall, it's nice when artists dealing with historical subjects understand that they're presenting imperfect models of the past, and state so, so that viewers can consider what might be accurate and what might not be.

I haven't heard of this, was mainly thinking about how Rome Total War (the original at least) misrepresented most factions and units in it, especially the Egyptians. There wasn't even an enjoyable reason for it.

I think AI could actually makes it fairer for the average player because it "smears" the time a bit to a general "vibe".

That said I too was a bit annoyed by how it rendered the byzantine empire. I thought Carthage was meant. So i was over by a thousand years.

I had cranes constructing the library at Alexandria.