EA partners with the company behind Stable Diffusion to make games with AI
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Double boycott
So, repeatedly buy and return games?
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lol if you had read the rest of my post you would have seen I admitted you might be right. But go off, I guess.
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So what's your process and how is it a boon?
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Great for you. You did say "almost every workflow". How many workflows exist beyond your own lived experience? Do you work on games, do you know all the workflows there? Citation absolutely fucking needed.
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I've seen prototypes of RPGs where you could freeform talk to NPCs and I pretty quickly lost enthusiasm for the idea after seeing it in action.
It didn't feel like a DnD game where you're maneuvering a social conflict with the DM or other players, it felt more like the social equivalent of jumping up on a table where an NPC couldn't get to you and stabbing them in the face.
wrote last edited by [email protected]If I wanted to talk to NPCs at length I'd just type into a fucking chat bot. I play games to experience the developers story and vision, not endlessly prompt an npc.
I think your experience will be a common one for players.
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LLM generated code is notoriously bad. Like, "call this function that doesn't exist" is common. Maybe a more specialized model would do better, but I don't think it would ever be completely reliable.
But even aside from that, it's not going to be able to map the free form user input to behavior that isn't already defined. If there's nothing written to handle "stand on the table and make a speech", or "climb over that wall" it's not going to be able to make the NPC do that even if the player is telling them too.
But maybe you're more right than I am. I don't know. I don't do game development. I find it hard to imagine it won't frequently run into situations where natural language input demands stuff the engine doesn't know how to do.
Alright I did read further and damn, you just keep going on being wrong, buddy!
Yes, you can fucking do "stand on the table and make a speech" work. You know how? By breaking it up into detailed steps (pun intended), something that LLMs are awesome at!
For example in this case the LLM could query the position and direction of the table compared to the NPC and do the following:
- plan a natural path between the two points (although the game engine most likely already has such a function)
- make the NPC follow that path
- upon path end, it will instruct the NPC to step onto the table via existing functions (Skyrim pretty much has all these base behaviours already coded, but the scripting engine should also be able to modify the skeleton rig of an NPC directly, which means the LLM can easily write it)
- then the script can initiate dialogue too.
I've asked Perplexity (not even one of the best coding agents out there, it's mistake ratio is around 5%), and within seconds it spit out a full on script to identify the nearest table or desk, and start talking. You can take a look here. And while my Papyrus is a bit rusty, it does seem correct on even the third read-through - but that's the fun part, one does not need trust the AI, as this script can be run through a compiler or even a validator (which let's be honest is a stripped down compiler first stage) to verify it isn't faulty, which the LLM can then interact with and iterate over the code based on the compiler feedback (which would point out errors).
now mind you this is the output of an internet-enabled, research oriented LLM that hasn't been fine-tuned for Papyrus and Skyrim. With some work you could probably get a 0.5B local model that does only natural language to Papyrus translation, combined with a 4B LLM that does the context expansion (aka what you see in the Perplexity feed, my simple request being detailed step by step) and reiteration.
You'd also be surprised just how flexible game engines are. Especially freeroaming, RPG style engines. Devs are usually lazy so they don't want to hardcore all the behaviours, so they create ways to make it simple for game designers to actually code those behaviours and share between units. For example, both a regular object (say, a chair) and a character type object (such as an NPC) will have a move() function that moves them from A to B, but latter will have extra calls in that function that ensure the humanoid character isn't just sliding to the new position but taking steps as it moves, turns the right direction and so on. Once all these base behaviours are available, it's super easy to put them together. This is precisely why we have so many high quality Skyrim mods (or in general for Bethesda games).
And again, code quality in LLMs has come a VERY long way. I'm a software engineer by trade, and I'd say somewhere between 80-90% of all the code I write is actually done by AI. I still oversee it, review what it does, direct it the right way when it does something silly, but those aren't as minor functionalities as we're talking here. I've had AI code a full on display driver for a microcontroller, with very specific restrictions, in about 4 hours (and I'd argue 2 of that was spent with running the driver and evaluating the result manually then identifying the issue and working out a solution with the LLM). In 4 hours I managed to do what otherwise would've taken me about a week.
Now imagine that the same thing only needs to do relatively small tasks, not figure out optimal data caching and updating strategies tied to active information delivery to the user with appropriate transformation into UI state holders.
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Those poor players lol
They have every opportunity to tell me they're not liking what I run. Turns out I know them better than you do.
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To be fair, it probably won’t suck any more than EA games have for the past… er… ten years?
Respawn still made some pretty fun games. But errr yea that's pretty much it.
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Yes, you can fucking do “stand on the table and make a speech” work. You know how? By breaking it up into detailed steps (pun intended), something that LLMs are awesome at!
My intended point was the LLM at run time taking user input wouldn't be able to do "make a speech" if the game engine doesn't have that concept already encoded. And if the game is presented as "take user input and respond believably" then users are going to ask for stuff the engine can't do. Maybe there's no animations for climbing. Maybe they did some shortcuts and the graphics look bizarre when stuff is elevated.
I wasn't talking about Skyrim specifically.
But also you're being unpleasant in this exchange, so you can win.
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So what's your process and how is it a boon?
wrote last edited by [email protected]Major applications I use AI for:
- Art, obviously. I generate lots of illustrations of the characters and other things they encounter. These days image generators have become good enough that I usually just have to describe things well in the prompt and get usable results, but if I need to edit the images to get them closer to what I need I run ComfyUI locally and have lots of models for that as well.
- I use producer.ai to generate custom music. Sometimes it's diagetic - in the previous campaign the party encountered an NPC that loved to sing about important plot developments in-universe - but mostly it's either background soundscape or supplementary songs (consider them like "theme music" that plays during the intro or credits). Producer.ai closed down new subscriptions a while back but I've also used Udio and Suno and they're both good too.
- I record the sessions and transcribe them using WhisperX. I feed the transcripts into NotebookLM and have it generate summaries and notes about the events of each session. It can also generate "overview" videos that work great as a 5-minute catch-up players can watch before the session if they've forgotten what happened last time.
- Since NotebookLM has all my campaign notes in it as source documents, as well as PDFs of the rulebooks, it's great for quickly whipping up stats for creatures when the players do something unexpected. It's also been a good brainstorming assistant, and it "knows" the names of every random little NPC or village we've seen along the way.
I've been experimenting with the Wan2.2 video model lately. It's not quite up to snuff for generating videos of meaningful length, but it's still pretty neat to be able to put a character portrait in and have a 5-second snippet of them just "being alive." I think it'll be a neat addition to having static portraits.
Aside from producer.ai, all of these tools are free. Though the WhisperX transcription program I use is a custom Python script, I'm not sure what would be a good solution for a non-programmer to spin up.
Edit: Downvoting me isn't making any of these tools less useful.
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You are going to get downvoted, but you're right. AI doesn't need to be used for every part of the entire development process for it to be "made with the help of AI". There are certain parts of the workflow that I'm sure is already being done regularly with AI, for example commenting code.
Mindlessly feeding prompts into chatgpt for the entirety of the core code or art would be terrible.
I haven't been getting downvoted as much as I used to these days, at least. I think more people have started to actually experiment with AI and see what it's good at, and are finding it to be not the Great Satan that popular opinion paints it as.
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So, repeatedly buy and return games?
Will my steam account get banned if I pre-order every one of their games, click play for 5 minutes then instantly refund? I have my faith, but I don't know if they'd see that as abuse of their refund policy.
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This will suck so fucking hard
For them
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I can't start boycotting a company that I've been boycotting for well over a decade.
Carry on, sir.
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Great for you. You did say "almost every workflow". How many workflows exist beyond your own lived experience? Do you work on games, do you know all the workflows there? Citation absolutely fucking needed.
I have worked on games, and have a good understanding of the workflows involved.
You'll obviously still need to do the creative parts manually (and should!) but the majority of the work involving the engine core build and the specific game coding, that can all be sped up borderline exponentially.
But I'm glad that someone with absolutely no understanding of the topic does their best to call out those who do show some experience on the topic just because they don't get a neatly pre-chewed and pre-digested reply detailing all the information they lack and are unwilling to look it up themselves. As a next step would you like me to cut your steak up and feed it to you byte by byte, or tuck you in at night?
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He who has never tasted bread would be contented by porridge.
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He who has never tasted bread would be contented by porridge.
We've been playing together for ~20 years, since long before there were any AI tools.
Once again you're making some wildly inaccurate assumptions.
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You think I have them captive somehow? Your assumptions are getting weirder and weirder.
We all have other groups we play with too, this is just the "core" group that's been together longest.
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wrote last edited by [email protected]
For sure, the popular opinion on reddit/Lemmy skews towards absolutely self-hosting everything they can, and multi-trillion dollar tech companies controlling AI skews the opinions of the technology negative. I have a BIL who runs self-hosted AI though (requiring 2 x 4090s in series for his use-case), so it can be done. The tech is only as shit as the user allows it to be (environmental concerns, obviously its pretty objectively shit)
