you guys joke but AI npcs have the potential of being awesome
A really good place would be background banter. Greatly reducing the amount of extra dialogues the devs will have to think of.
- Give the AI a proper scenario, with some Game lore based context, applicable to each background character.
- Make them talk to each other for around 5-10 rounds of conversation.
- Read them, just to make sure nothing seems out of place.
- Bundle them with TTS for each character sound type.
Sure, you’ll have to make a TTS package for each voice, but at the same time, that can be licensed directly by the VA to the game studio, on a per-title basis and they too, can then get more $$$ for less work.
They won’t because of hallucinations. They could work in mature games though where its expected that whatever the AI says is not going to break your brain.
But yeah a kid walks up to toad in the next Mario game and toad tells Mario to go slap peaches ass, that game would get pulled really quick.
I just re-read my comment and realised I was not clear enough.
You bundle the text and the AI-TTS. Not the AI text generator.
Oh come on, LLMs don’t hallucinate 24/7. For that, you have to ask a chatbot to say something it wasn’t properly trained for. But generating simple texts for background chatter? That’s safe and easy. The real issue is the amount of resources required by modern LLMs. But technologies tend to become better with time.
they too, can then get more $$$ for less work.
I’m pretty sure it’ll be less money for less work, at least after the first few titles. Companies really don’t like paying more than they have to.
True, but if the VA (or their agent) has any sense of business they’ll be making more per hour
ai being used for good may unfortunately have to wait till the destruction of capitalism
AI being used for anything will have to wait until it actually works reliably.
I currently use AI, through Nvidia Broadcast, to remove the sound of the literal server rack feet away from my xlr mic in my definitely not sound treated room so people I’m gaming with don’t wind up muting me. It also removes the clickety clack of my blue switches and my mouse clicks, all that shit.
It’s insanely reliable, and honestly a complete godsend. I could muck around with compressors and noise gates to try to cut out the high pitch server fan whine, but then my voice gets wonky and I’ve wasted weeks bc I’m not an audio engineer but I’m obsessive, and the mic is still picking up my farts bc why not use an xlr condenser mic to shit talk in cs?
Edit - Oh, I also use the virtual speaker that Broadcast creates as the in-game (or Discord or whatever) voice output, and AI removes the same shit from other people’s audio. I’ve heard people complaining about background music from another teammates open mic while all I hear is their perfectly clear voice. It’s like straight up magic.
Perfect headline.
did you know that there’s a button on each comment which is purpose built for you to express this exact sentiment? i’ve provided a helpful diagram:
Engaging with other people on this small platform makes it feel less empty. There aren’t many people here, so I go out of my way to talk to people instead of just interacting with the number beside their comment or post.
Up and down votes are not a “agree / disagree” button. They are for dis/encouraging posts. You can upvote a post you disagree with but can see that it is useful for the discussion.
Ok this got a chuckle out of me. But yeah, I don’t see any problem with people expressing agreement verbally.
Imagine a real conversation where you’re only allowed to agree with someone with nods, never saying “yeah I agree completely” or any other verbal feedback.
You know if you don’t think a comment adds to the discussion there’s a purpose built button for you to express that exact sentiment? It’s right below the one you pointed out in your very helpful diagram.
When an AI is able to take and write every single line of code, generate all the art, and debug it just by having someone as code dumb as a CEO type in a prompt, I’ll believe his words and eat my shirt.
The thing is even if AI could do all that (which is doubtful in my life time), you would still need someone to prompt it with something interesting. And CEO types have never had an interesting idea in their lives
There is a possibility something like this will be possible in the future, but it’s not going to be an achievement of AI, it’s largely going to be the achievement of regular developers creating a general-purpose game engine that can be used to put together a game block by block, which can be utilized by both human game designers and AI. (Likely to better effect by the former.) I can imagine Entity Component Systems will play a big part of that.
One of the biggest blockers for AI making games is going to be testing it to select for better performance. With text it’s relatively easy to see if some text an AI produced is plausible. Images are also plentiful, but that’s a lot more subjective. With both of these it would also not take a massive amount of time to add a human element. It’s quick to check if a paragraph or image looks like it is a good response to the input promt. A game, however? How long do you need to play it to see if it’s fun? At best, perhaps, you can write an AI to control a bot character to see if it’s technically playable.
I don’t want to even think about the electricity that wlll be wasted training such models.
ECS has really nothing to do with this. ECS is just a specific way to store the internal state of a program, fundamentally no different from other data structures.
Also, a good game is far more than just text and images and current “AI” can’t even generate those individually. A game needs significant thought put into things like game loops, story arcs, balancing,… that are non-obvious when existing games would just be training data. Not to mention that using an existing game as training data is both non-trivial and also we just don’t have the vast amounts of them that current systems seem to need to produce anything even half-way decent.
ECS already makes it a hundred times easier for me to conceptualize game mechanics, modify and extend them. Giving AI the ability the ability to create data separate from systems that use them will make it much easier for it to build a game. I don’t believe for a second it will be able to write functioning object-oriented game code for example. It will likely be best if it avoided coding via a text-based language altogether, and use visual scripting or another system based on chaining logic blocks together. But that still counts as the “system” part of ECS.
Man, I’m getting tired of everyone and their cat saying shit like “AI will…”.
With how loosely defined “AI” is, it probably will at some point. But that statement is also completely worthless.
