It’s worth remembering that this guy says anything that’s in the current trend because just saying those things helps share prices. Then nothing comes of it.
FF16 wasn’t stuffed full of nfts or crypto or even microtransactions even though the president makes comments about this stuff.
If AI can’t find its market (which for all the hype it hasn’t thus far), then yes. Alternatively AI finds its market and it just becomes a norm that’s expected so no one will mention it at all
if AI can’t find its market (which for all the hype it hasn’t thus far)
AIs market is every market, which is why it seems like AI isn’t “doing much.” The primary benefit of AI in its current form is finding and driving efficiencies.
It’s much more like the internet in the early 90s than it is the block chain. AI hasn’t had its “dot com bubble” begin yet, because right now it’s all targeted services.
no, it’s every market when it’s actually a part of those markets, delivering value and funding itself. It is not doing that today. It may do that tomorrow, but not today.
Today AI is in the investor-funded, throw everything against the wall stage. the hope is that something will stick and become what drives that industry in the future. It hasn’t found that yet. AI could vanish tomorrow and no one would notice.
It is absolutely doing that today. From medicine to fucking call center QA.
That you don’t know about it is further evidence of my claim - AI is currently being leveraged within existing toolsets that you also do not know about.
One Verint system can do the jobs of multiple QA professionals while also handling WFM tasks that previously required 1-3 more jobs, all of which are innately high-paying due to being so specialized.
I use Synthesia every day to make training content (well, my intern does, but still). This content would take a minimum of 4 people to produce without the existing software. I know because we considered building that team and went with Synthesia instead. These aren’t plugs either - there are competitors to both of the above that are continuing to push features forward.
In that specific context - of generating idle chit chat, sure. But is it ever going to be capable of generating the crucifixion quest from CP77, or Guild quests from Skyrim or the Festers Blue Star Bottlecaps from FONV?
or is it going to be more A New Settlement Needs Your Help from FO4, or Dunk the Shape / Kill X Enemy Ys from Destiny 2? which, yknow, we already have.
Generating idle text does not a great game make. Especially when you could just write it better.
And that’s not to mention the impact on the VO actor - who is unlikely to want to sell the IP to their voice
I am actually working on something for the quest generation problem. It is still in the experimental phases, so who knows if it will bear fruit, but don’t sell the concept short.
I remain politely skeptical. I’m not the least technical person- but also not a dev - but this AI has to create multiple NPCs that say sensical things, in a narrative form, in a reachable location, in a playable architecture and geography, using themed assets, realistic and not over-/under- powered rewards… draw, plot and arrange said assets, actors, cues, generate speech-to-text and assign the correct asset to the correct cue/trigger — all of which seem to me to be beyond the reach of AI/ML models at the current point in time, or else subject to multi-hour loading and generation times.
Then there’s the issue of if you’re generating assets for the engine, and it needs a filesystem to store those assets, is it not incredibly easy to create massive security holes? An attacker looks at the program, see it generates and FBX or OBJ and can use that as a security hole to inject malicious code.
Also, doesn’t engines like Unity, Godot, need to compile these assets and process them? It’s beyond my technical knowledge but you can’t edit game assets on the fly, right? Like I can’t just open up MYGUN.TEXTURE and paint it blue and now I have a blue gun without closing the game, right? How do you work around that?
You can change assets on the fly, yeah. Usually with stuff like making a gun blue you’d just load another texture and apply it to the material. It really depends on what the game is designed to do.
For example a game where all the lighting is baked would have issues if certain parts of the level were changed in real time because you’d need to rebake the lighting (or add some dynamic lights specifically for certain objects)
Stuff like creating a quest in real time to the extent of hand crafted quests doesn’t sound like it’s quite there yet but there doesn’t seem to be a technical limitation there other than what AI can do and how to refine it to do that in an interesting way.
You never know but it still feels a bit early considering how little has been done so far.
Not to belabor the point here, but in a discussion of “can AI do this” [now/soon] - saying “if AI could do this… then it could do this - but it cant - but it might” doesn’t seem to really counter my point that the next 5 years being full of empty promises about the potential (but not actualization) of AI.
On your first point, no, an individual AI is not, and never will be, capable of doing all of those things. What is will be is an analog to how the human brain works. You don’t see, hear, move, and process the words of a conversation you have while walking down the street with a friend using the same pieces of the brain. The occipital lobe, auditory and locomotive sections of the somatosensory cortex, and language center of the prefrontal lobe handle the parts independently of each other, then the information is brought together and presented to your conscious mind. An AI-driven questing system would have multiple specialized AIs that worked together to generate it. So a model which analyzes the current state of the player to determine valid reward thresholds and quest objective difficulties, another one which maps the current world lore to make sure that the quest fits into the world state, another which fills in all of the dialog based on NPC background variables, then a final AI which is trained to look at the outputs of the others to resolve conflicts. Finally, an AI voice synthesis can round out the experience for players. All of those can run in parallel and can use quite a few metrics from player interaction as feedback for refining the training.
To your second point, most of the aspects of a quest are rather small and can be stored in memory. The rewards can get interesting. If they are a world object, procedural modeling can go a long way to making it so asset generation is not necessary. If it is perks or traits of some variety, this could be something generational which uses keyword detailing to create the parameters for the trait. Generation and storage of details and items are not really much of an issue.
As for the engine questions, all of them can process geometry, textures, and text from memory or new files on disk. If something needs to be compiled, then it can be compiled on the fly. Again, individual assets are pretty lightweight and would not require a lot of processessing.
Another speed-up would be to pregenerate details of the quests rather than attempting to do it all using a just-in-time implementation. The game could generate the parameters for the world for NPC’s in town when you load in, starting with the ones closest to the player position and progressively iterating over them in the direction of travel. All you need to do is have details ready for the “chat bot” portion of the interaction by the time the player is capable of reaching any given NPC. These are the boundaries of what is possible so not as heavy as generating the whole thing. Then the rest can be filled in while the player talks with them.
The biggest issue I see is continuity error hardening. Making sure that all of the NPC’s worlds are consistent with each other and nobody makes changes that break the world for other NPC’s. That is specifically what I am trying to work on.
I’ve been hearing promises of the human brain being replicated by a PC since the 1980s, so again, politely, I consider that hyperbole/marketing gumpf until we see a working model.
I don’t particularly care if “AI” means a single model, multiple models, or multiple models banded together to appear as a single model or vice versa.
I didn’t realize you can just chop and change models on the fly, but taking those and similar issues as read (or at least probably solvable with modern day tech) — that leaves us with your multiple-AIs with specific functions.
Now I’m not saying it’s theoretically impossible, but i am asking: will you have a working prototype that can be run on a consumer home pc in the next 5 years? Or, are you, as I am very keenly aware of, simply doing what I stated in my first post: being a tech start up promising eventual, incremental process as product features?
Because my experience is, to generate a flat image from a model takes at least 20 seconds, not to mention 3D models with collision, mesh, animations etc. And 20 seconds is considered a long loading screen by modern standards. Gamers expect entire cities/planets to load in their game in under a minute.
Are we even close to generating even an untextured room with a single untextured T-pose NPC with no cues, triggers or animations from AI? Or, would it simply be using a language model to obfuscate the current and standard process for generating those assets to the user, when actually it’s just loading them from RNG.
Are we close to generating an untextured room with a single untextured T-pose NPC?
This is unnecessary. The environment and characters can all still be built and rigged using modern hand modeling and set design techniques. The get here would be the animations. All animations, and I mean all, are just a bunch of splines and interpolations in the engine. Curve fitting is something that AI’s have been getting trained to do for 50 years. It is a solved problem. What is not solved, and the reason we don’t see a ton of AI animation tools already is a lack of sufficiently large sample sets of good animations attached to a variety of rigs and a method of training the AI to be environmentally aware. I imagine the latter could be solved using computer vision techniques with virtual sensors like what is used for Crowds. It is actually a hypothetical problem that I am planning on tackling after my current project.
Or would it be using a language model to obfuscate using an RNG?
This is almost insulting to the entire field of AI development, not to mention the mathematical fields of Probability Theory and Statistics. While AI models do function on Game Theory and Probability Theory models and are probabilistic, they are most definitely not any form of RNG. If you have that mindset, I suggest you do some more reading on the topics in scholarly publications or textbooks. Skip the pop-sci articles and blog posts.
As to your questions on timing, it may be this year, it may be 20 years. 2 years ago the idea of making photoreal images with AI was a pipe dream, then along comes Stable Diffusion and in less than 18 months we have gone from making passable images of a cat to an almost fully art-directable toolset capable of creating coherent videos. This is an amazing progressive leap and AIs in general have become more diverse because of it. It is a testament to just how fast something like this can grow given the right FOSS architecture and public interest. My guess is that it is closer to the 2 to 3-year range for a coherent world-building AI. That is not modeling, rigging, or animating, just the textual stuff. Story, relationships, lore, history, etc. My first tool I am trying to build is a world-building assistant for TTRPG GMs if that gives you a clearer picture of what I’m talking about.
Finally, the geometry generation times. You mention your experience, but I am struggling to pin down exactly what that entails for you. I mentioned using procedural modeling and having an AI that decides the parameters of the procedural when doing the modeling. In this setup the modeling is all mathematics and is done instantly. It can even include procedurally defined animations and affects that are able to be generated on the fly in microseconds. If you have 3D experience, I would suggest checking out Houdini ( https://www.sidefx.com ) to get a better grip on what is possible with proceduralism. They also have tools for doing rigging and animation that an AI could directly interface with, which can be utilized in game development realms as well as VFX.
There are already mods that add voices to mod-scripted lines for Skyrim and Fallout 4. As well as a joke mod where the author took all of the recorded voice lines for Deep Rock Galactic(DRG), ran them through AI translators 40 times, then had an AI record the end result using the intonation and inflection of the characters in DRG.
However, the quotes from MS in the article provide an insight into their plans.
Replace all localization teams.
Replace all QA teams with AI that just run the level infinitely.
Interestingly, both of those show a fundamental lack of understanding of what a LLM can do. Yes it can do basic translation, but it fails on context in translations. E.g:
The French translation “you are a fool” can be “tu es un imbecile” but can also be “vous etes un imbecile” depending on the relationship context of the people talking.
And asking AI to replace QA entirely… oof, I guess I know to avoid MS games at launch from now on. Will be a lot of bugs.
They did try that Symbiogenesis NFT bulshit. Now I’m not even sure if anything came out of it. Apparently it was supposed to be released this December but I didn’t hear a single thing about it.
Apparently it was released December 21th, but I cannot find a single thing whatsoever about how it played out. Which by itself doesn’t make it seem very successful.
It’s all just SEO farming. Square Enix isn’t setting the world on fire with 14 and 16, and there was exactly zero hype for OT2 and Various Daylife (worst game title ever), so they need to always say hypemachine phrases just in case anyone searching for AI or NFTs is also hungry for a milquetoast JRPG.
These words are also for the hopes that someone will buy this company and put them out of their misery. If FF7R 2 fails in the marketplace, they’re doomed.
It’s worth remembering that this guy says anything that’s in the current trend because just saying those things helps share prices. Then nothing comes of it.
FF16 wasn’t stuffed full of nfts or crypto or even microtransactions even though the president makes comments about this stuff.
These words aren’t for you, it’s for the market.
So will every single tech Director-VP-CxO; then in 5 years everyone will say “AI” in the same tone of voice they say “Blockchain”
If AI can’t find its market (which for all the hype it hasn’t thus far), then yes. Alternatively AI finds its market and it just becomes a norm that’s expected so no one will mention it at all
AIs market is every market, which is why it seems like AI isn’t “doing much.” The primary benefit of AI in its current form is finding and driving efficiencies.
It’s much more like the internet in the early 90s than it is the block chain. AI hasn’t had its “dot com bubble” begin yet, because right now it’s all targeted services.
no, it’s every market when it’s actually a part of those markets, delivering value and funding itself. It is not doing that today. It may do that tomorrow, but not today.
Today AI is in the investor-funded, throw everything against the wall stage. the hope is that something will stick and become what drives that industry in the future. It hasn’t found that yet. AI could vanish tomorrow and no one would notice.
It is absolutely doing that today. From medicine to fucking call center QA.
That you don’t know about it is further evidence of my claim - AI is currently being leveraged within existing toolsets that you also do not know about.
One Verint system can do the jobs of multiple QA professionals while also handling WFM tasks that previously required 1-3 more jobs, all of which are innately high-paying due to being so specialized.
I use Synthesia every day to make training content (well, my intern does, but still). This content would take a minimum of 4 people to produce without the existing software. I know because we considered building that team and went with Synthesia instead. These aren’t plugs either - there are competitors to both of the above that are continuing to push features forward.
AI is absolutely paying for itself.
I doubt it. AI is actually useful for games. I’d love a Skyrim where there were infinite unique npcs who don’t repeat dialog on a loop.
In that specific context - of generating idle chit chat, sure. But is it ever going to be capable of generating the crucifixion quest from CP77, or Guild quests from Skyrim or the Festers Blue Star Bottlecaps from FONV?
or is it going to be more A New Settlement Needs Your Help from FO4, or Dunk the Shape / Kill X Enemy Ys from Destiny 2? which, yknow, we already have.
Generating idle text does not a great game make. Especially when you could just write it better.
And that’s not to mention the impact on the VO actor - who is unlikely to want to sell the IP to their voice
I am actually working on something for the quest generation problem. It is still in the experimental phases, so who knows if it will bear fruit, but don’t sell the concept short.
I remain politely skeptical. I’m not the least technical person- but also not a dev - but this AI has to create multiple NPCs that say sensical things, in a narrative form, in a reachable location, in a playable architecture and geography, using themed assets, realistic and not over-/under- powered rewards… draw, plot and arrange said assets, actors, cues, generate speech-to-text and assign the correct asset to the correct cue/trigger — all of which seem to me to be beyond the reach of AI/ML models at the current point in time, or else subject to multi-hour loading and generation times.
Then there’s the issue of if you’re generating assets for the engine, and it needs a filesystem to store those assets, is it not incredibly easy to create massive security holes? An attacker looks at the program, see it generates and FBX or OBJ and can use that as a security hole to inject malicious code.
Also, doesn’t engines like Unity, Godot, need to compile these assets and process them? It’s beyond my technical knowledge but you can’t edit game assets on the fly, right? Like I can’t just open up MYGUN.TEXTURE and paint it blue and now I have a blue gun without closing the game, right? How do you work around that?
You can change assets on the fly, yeah. Usually with stuff like making a gun blue you’d just load another texture and apply it to the material. It really depends on what the game is designed to do. For example a game where all the lighting is baked would have issues if certain parts of the level were changed in real time because you’d need to rebake the lighting (or add some dynamic lights specifically for certain objects)
Stuff like creating a quest in real time to the extent of hand crafted quests doesn’t sound like it’s quite there yet but there doesn’t seem to be a technical limitation there other than what AI can do and how to refine it to do that in an interesting way. You never know but it still feels a bit early considering how little has been done so far.
Not to belabor the point here, but in a discussion of “can AI do this” [now/soon] - saying “if AI could do this… then it could do this - but it cant - but it might” doesn’t seem to really counter my point that the next 5 years being full of empty promises about the potential (but not actualization) of AI.
I was more just giving context about how things work from a game dev perspective
On your first point, no, an individual AI is not, and never will be, capable of doing all of those things. What is will be is an analog to how the human brain works. You don’t see, hear, move, and process the words of a conversation you have while walking down the street with a friend using the same pieces of the brain. The occipital lobe, auditory and locomotive sections of the somatosensory cortex, and language center of the prefrontal lobe handle the parts independently of each other, then the information is brought together and presented to your conscious mind. An AI-driven questing system would have multiple specialized AIs that worked together to generate it. So a model which analyzes the current state of the player to determine valid reward thresholds and quest objective difficulties, another one which maps the current world lore to make sure that the quest fits into the world state, another which fills in all of the dialog based on NPC background variables, then a final AI which is trained to look at the outputs of the others to resolve conflicts. Finally, an AI voice synthesis can round out the experience for players. All of those can run in parallel and can use quite a few metrics from player interaction as feedback for refining the training.
To your second point, most of the aspects of a quest are rather small and can be stored in memory. The rewards can get interesting. If they are a world object, procedural modeling can go a long way to making it so asset generation is not necessary. If it is perks or traits of some variety, this could be something generational which uses keyword detailing to create the parameters for the trait. Generation and storage of details and items are not really much of an issue.
As for the engine questions, all of them can process geometry, textures, and text from memory or new files on disk. If something needs to be compiled, then it can be compiled on the fly. Again, individual assets are pretty lightweight and would not require a lot of processessing.
Another speed-up would be to pregenerate details of the quests rather than attempting to do it all using a just-in-time implementation. The game could generate the parameters for the world for NPC’s in town when you load in, starting with the ones closest to the player position and progressively iterating over them in the direction of travel. All you need to do is have details ready for the “chat bot” portion of the interaction by the time the player is capable of reaching any given NPC. These are the boundaries of what is possible so not as heavy as generating the whole thing. Then the rest can be filled in while the player talks with them.
The biggest issue I see is continuity error hardening. Making sure that all of the NPC’s worlds are consistent with each other and nobody makes changes that break the world for other NPC’s. That is specifically what I am trying to work on.
I’ve been hearing promises of the human brain being replicated by a PC since the 1980s, so again, politely, I consider that hyperbole/marketing gumpf until we see a working model.
I don’t particularly care if “AI” means a single model, multiple models, or multiple models banded together to appear as a single model or vice versa.
I didn’t realize you can just chop and change models on the fly, but taking those and similar issues as read (or at least probably solvable with modern day tech) — that leaves us with your multiple-AIs with specific functions.
Now I’m not saying it’s theoretically impossible, but i am asking: will you have a working prototype that can be run on a consumer home pc in the next 5 years? Or, are you, as I am very keenly aware of, simply doing what I stated in my first post: being a tech start up promising eventual, incremental process as product features?
Because my experience is, to generate a flat image from a model takes at least 20 seconds, not to mention 3D models with collision, mesh, animations etc. And 20 seconds is considered a long loading screen by modern standards. Gamers expect entire cities/planets to load in their game in under a minute.
Are we even close to generating even an untextured room with a single untextured T-pose NPC with no cues, triggers or animations from AI? Or, would it simply be using a language model to obfuscate the current and standard process for generating those assets to the user, when actually it’s just loading them from RNG.
This is unnecessary. The environment and characters can all still be built and rigged using modern hand modeling and set design techniques. The get here would be the animations. All animations, and I mean all, are just a bunch of splines and interpolations in the engine. Curve fitting is something that AI’s have been getting trained to do for 50 years. It is a solved problem. What is not solved, and the reason we don’t see a ton of AI animation tools already is a lack of sufficiently large sample sets of good animations attached to a variety of rigs and a method of training the AI to be environmentally aware. I imagine the latter could be solved using computer vision techniques with virtual sensors like what is used for Crowds. It is actually a hypothetical problem that I am planning on tackling after my current project.
This is almost insulting to the entire field of AI development, not to mention the mathematical fields of Probability Theory and Statistics. While AI models do function on Game Theory and Probability Theory models and are probabilistic, they are most definitely not any form of RNG. If you have that mindset, I suggest you do some more reading on the topics in scholarly publications or textbooks. Skip the pop-sci articles and blog posts.
As to your questions on timing, it may be this year, it may be 20 years. 2 years ago the idea of making photoreal images with AI was a pipe dream, then along comes Stable Diffusion and in less than 18 months we have gone from making passable images of a cat to an almost fully art-directable toolset capable of creating coherent videos. This is an amazing progressive leap and AIs in general have become more diverse because of it. It is a testament to just how fast something like this can grow given the right FOSS architecture and public interest. My guess is that it is closer to the 2 to 3-year range for a coherent world-building AI. That is not modeling, rigging, or animating, just the textual stuff. Story, relationships, lore, history, etc. My first tool I am trying to build is a world-building assistant for TTRPG GMs if that gives you a clearer picture of what I’m talking about.
Finally, the geometry generation times. You mention your experience, but I am struggling to pin down exactly what that entails for you. I mentioned using procedural modeling and having an AI that decides the parameters of the procedural when doing the modeling. In this setup the modeling is all mathematics and is done instantly. It can even include procedurally defined animations and affects that are able to be generated on the fly in microseconds. If you have 3D experience, I would suggest checking out Houdini ( https://www.sidefx.com ) to get a better grip on what is possible with proceduralism. They also have tools for doing rigging and animation that an AI could directly interface with, which can be utilized in game development realms as well as VFX.
Will it ever be capable of that? Most certainly yes.
But we won’t ever get there if nobody does the first step.
There are already mods that add voices to mod-scripted lines for Skyrim and Fallout 4. As well as a joke mod where the author took all of the recorded voice lines for Deep Rock Galactic(DRG), ran them through AI translators 40 times, then had an AI record the end result using the intonation and inflection of the characters in DRG.
However, the quotes from MS in the article provide an insight into their plans.
Interestingly, both of those show a fundamental lack of understanding of what a LLM can do. Yes it can do basic translation, but it fails on context in translations. E.g:
The French translation “you are a fool” can be “tu es un imbecile” but can also be “vous etes un imbecile” depending on the relationship context of the people talking.
And asking AI to replace QA entirely… oof, I guess I know to avoid MS games at launch from now on. Will be a lot of bugs.
I’m actually in the process of trying to get this setup to try myself. Wish me luck!
They did try that Symbiogenesis NFT bulshit. Now I’m not even sure if anything came out of it. Apparently it was supposed to be released this December but I didn’t hear a single thing about it.
Did they try it? There was 1 trailer and the backlash from the internet was so severe the project got completely buried.
Apparently it was released December 21th, but I cannot find a single thing whatsoever about how it played out. Which by itself doesn’t make it seem very successful.
It’s all just SEO farming. Square Enix isn’t setting the world on fire with 14 and 16, and there was exactly zero hype for OT2 and Various Daylife (worst game title ever), so they need to always say hypemachine phrases just in case anyone searching for AI or NFTs is also hungry for a milquetoast JRPG.
These words are also for the hopes that someone will buy this company and put them out of their misery. If FF7R 2 fails in the marketplace, they’re doomed.