The person above you is wrong, while a generalist model will struggle to make valid pixel art, either a specially trained model or one with elements to force a specific structure could make generative pixel art.
Yep. It will create something that at a glance looks like pixel art, then you zoom in and find anti-aliased rectangular pixels made out of three different shades of the main color, a weird line, and no clear grid.
A whole song and dance to post-process a broken pixel art image into a fixed grid. I’d rather just have talent or pay a human being that will make art in the first place, thanks.
Also, the example shown would be a terrible image to use as an asset, by the way. It’s a clear example of not pixel art, rather, 2D art forced to be interpolated in a “pixel like” fashion (aka what happens if you do a few nearest neighbor passes and then a fixed grid downsampling)
Note that there’s more than one model to do pixel art and there’s pixel art LoRAs that do a decent job. There’s loads of flexibility when generating this kind of thing.
Also, you can just tell it to generate a thousand over like 10 minutes and pick the best one and use that as a base to improve upon. AI is just a single tool in the workflow.
I also want to point out that not everyone can just pay someone. Don’t be paternalistic: If people want to use AI in their workflow for any reason that’s their concern. To angrily throw your hands in the air and say, “I’m not touching it because AI!” is like giving free money to the big publishers.
You’re setting a completely unnecessary high bar, “you must be this rich to ride.”
Why do you want it to fail? I’m so happy that Sega is one of the companies who does games that are not mainstream boring stuff. In fact, this is something I would expect from a small indie team. Shouldn’t we celebrate that and support?
Watch… They’ll make money by virtue signalling “no AI use” and then the second AI inevitably goes mainstream pivot to showing off because they use “the best AI”. The trick is to make money no matter which way the wind blows.
There’s no shortage of games that are fun to play, you can just select for studios that don’t rely on the Grand Plagiarism Tool to get you to give them money
It’s not all plagiarism, though. For instance, Embark Studios uses AI to create in-game voice lines for characters in their games. They made their own models with actors hired specifically to train them.
That’s kinda a different case than what everyone is referring to when they’re talking about this
However, it’s an interesting point: do we know those voice actors are being paid the same as if they did the lines all themselves or is this a studio cheaping out on paying actors to do the job?
There might have been a load of actors who turned the job down before they found someone desperate enough for the money or naive enough to not realise it will likely drive down wages for voice actors if this becomes commonplace.
You aren’t an outlier. People judge art in a complex way including final product uniqueness and complexity. AI is just one factor. Hardcore anti AI crowd lives mostly in their own echo chamber.
No. DeviantArt, Universal, Disney, Shutterstock, Instagram and friends are the juggernauts. Artists already gave it all away.
There isn’t a scenario where individual artists get a piece of that money. Legislation, if it comes, will protect data aggregators, record companies and Hollywood, with the aim of killing open source.
Google paid 60$ million for Reddit’s data and I still haven’t received my dollar. Google would also love it if training a model costs so much only they could afford to build a legal one.
I’m saying they stopped owning it the moment they put it on the big websites and signed away their work by clicking the box at the end of the ToS. I don’t think it’s right, just how it is.
I see two choices:
Scrapping isn’t considered theft and we all get easy access to these new tools.
It’s considered theft and the new tools end up behind censored subscription models while shutter stock makes a shit load of money.
Paying every artists what they are worth is a logistical nightmare because of the amount of data needed. It simply won’t happen and isn’t a realistic scenario. It sucks but sticking your head in the sand and giving a soft monopoly to google and openai only helps google and openai.
I understand what you are saying, but it also assumes surrendering to AI. Many of us are planning to avoid, boycott, and fight that slop to our dying breath. AI needs to be unpopular and unprofitable. The technology isn’t going to disappear, but we can make sure it’s not socially acceptable to steal from or replace humans with expensive, inefficient, misanthropic, planet-killing software and hardware. Progress is being made and it’s important to understand that — just like crypto — this is a fight we can win.
I hope your boss won’t pay you, because that honestly sounds like a logistical nightmare! They’d need like specialized employees and stuff to pay people! Craaazy!
Same TBF, I don’t really care if AI was used as long as it is an enjoyable game and the usage of it doesn’t contrast from the game itself.
Being said, most the time when generative AI is used, it comes out sloppy and unenjoyable so if there is the genAI flag on the store page I will definitely give it a more thorough once over.
Procedural or structural AI though I don’t even bat an eye on. It’s whatever at that point we have used tools like that for years anyway and it’s never been a problem.
Good games tend to be made by big teams. That’s why when you hear about some auteur recruiting his own random team for a game, it ends up being a failed venture usually.
AI is often an effort to replace large teams with small ones, churning someone’s half-baked thoughts into code and art. The result is rarely human and inventive; and in a lot of ways, it tends to show in the end product.
I’m mostly thinking of indie devs and how it can let small teams do more. I think some of these tools are a real boon to the industry, it’s quickly becoming trivial to included animated cut scenes for example. I think the human and inventive part can still shine with competent devs.
I’m not advocating for shovelware here or games that are 90% AI, but a lot of teams that can’t afford certain dedicated positions would probably benefit from using it in some parts of their game.
If it isn’t noticable and gives us a better game, I’m more than willing to ignore the copyright companies constant wailing.
This is my take at well, but not just for gaming… AI is changing the landscape for all sorts of things. For example, if you wanted a serious, professional grammar, consistency, and similar checks of your novel you had to pay thousands of dollars for a professional editor to go over it.
Now you can just paste a single chapter at a time into a FREE AI tool and get all that and more.
Yet here we are: Still seeing grammatical mistakes, copy & paste oversights, and similar in brand new books.It costs nothing! Just use the AI FFS.
Checking a book with an AI chat bot uses up as much power/water as like 1/100th of streaming a YouTube Short. It’s not a big deal.
The Nebula Awards recently banned books that used AI for grammar checking. My take: “OK, so only books from big publishers are allowed, then?”
Welcome to lemmy, your only allowed response to anything AI related is “AI bad”, otherwise the 20 or so people who actually use this platform will downvote your comment.
The Yamaha chip (YM2612) really gave it a super grunge sound, perfect for games like Comix Zone.
That said, it still felt at home with new age music like Ecco’s.
The fact that we had a synthesizer playing live music is still mesmerizing me.
This song (All Good Times, by MelonadeM) isn’t from a game, rather it’s one of the demo songs included with Furnace, a chiptune tracker. And it goes so fucking hard:
It’s the same kind of sadness that I feel knowing that a ton of YouTubers who would rather not show their face now have to just so that people know that they’re not a fucking clanker. Especially if they’re new at it and don’t have a backlog or community to prove that they’ve been around longer than the AI slop.
That’s excellent. And as these mega corps watch consumers favor those products. Maybe, just maybe they’ll fucking implode. That’s just a fantasy I know.
While we don’t do game development, my company has investigated using gen ai for code and we found that it doesn’t reliably assist us in anything other than boilerplate code. I personally found that it hallucinates APIs on the regular which made it a massive waste for me as I basically had to go back and rewrite most of the code myself. Using gen ai for code reminded me of every time I’ve worked at a company that outsourced code; we rarely ever got what we asked for and by the time we got something usable it still wouldn’t be up to our standards, which generally resulted in scrapping what was delivered and having to rewrite the whole thing internally.
Using AI for code requires a high level of specificity, software houses that are getting the most out of it are not using it so much inline or vibe coding because as you say that leads to hallucinations or having to repeat yourself.
The common approach now is to use multiple agents with different responsibilities, the human effectively becomes a team leader and uses one chatbot to orchestrate a plan being very specific about the outcomes and the requirements and breaking the plan down into phases,
Another agent will be used to write the code, they will have set rules files to keep them on guard rails, they will check their work as they go and deliver a pull request at the end of it for the human to check and approve
The next agent will be there to write tests and check the work of the second agent.
It’s a lot more work than writing a single prompt and expecting a good outcome or close approximation, but it is getting better results now.
I could see a refusal to use codegen as a potential liability, but that’s not “skills”. The biggest thing about codegen is you have to review it and just lower your expectations that the code comes from a technique dumber than the dumbest human intern you have ever seen and approach it with supremely thorough skepticism. It’s exhausting how dumb it can be and how you have to be paranoid for every single piece of output. But it’s not a “skill”
I made a post about thia exact thing a couple of weeks ago! I will give my money to people not using ai bullshit, and if theyre liars, they wont see a cent from me again. People need to stand up and have some damn principles about this.
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I wonder if the name Ecco has to do with John C. Lilly.
AI is quite bad at pixel art in fact.
It understands things must look roughly made by squares, but it doesn’t understand what pixels are and their fixed grid.
To be fair, humans are also bad at it these days, judging by the amount of mixels.
even if it is exclusively trained on pixel art?
The person above you is wrong, while a generalist model will struggle to make valid pixel art, either a specially trained model or one with elements to force a specific structure could make generative pixel art.
This seems like a valid example - https://pixel-art.ai/
Yep. It will create something that at a glance looks like pixel art, then you zoom in and find anti-aliased rectangular pixels made out of three different shades of the main color, a weird line, and no clear grid.
If you use a pixel art export node in ComfyUI that won’t be a problem. There’s a whole guide about it here:
https://inzaniak.github.io/blog/articles/the-pixel-art-comfyui-workflow-guide.html
A whole song and dance to post-process a broken pixel art image into a fixed grid. I’d rather just have talent or pay a human being that will make art in the first place, thanks.
Also, the example shown would be a terrible image to use as an asset, by the way. It’s a clear example of not pixel art, rather, 2D art forced to be interpolated in a “pixel like” fashion (aka what happens if you do a few nearest neighbor passes and then a fixed grid downsampling)
Note that there’s more than one model to do pixel art and there’s pixel art LoRAs that do a decent job. There’s loads of flexibility when generating this kind of thing.
Also, you can just tell it to generate a thousand over like 10 minutes and pick the best one and use that as a base to improve upon. AI is just a single tool in the workflow.
I also want to point out that not everyone can just pay someone. Don’t be paternalistic: If people want to use AI in their workflow for any reason that’s their concern. To angrily throw your hands in the air and say, “I’m not touching it because AI!” is like giving free money to the big publishers.
You’re setting a completely unnecessary high bar, “you must be this rich to ride.”
I’m not touching it because AI. Thanks.
They can base their pixel art off ai art, that resembles pixel art. Would still count as “no ai in the game” I guess.
What if I use DLSS to upscale and add frames?
Well it wouldn’t be a single pixel then, would it?
Maybe the new Ecco game will be optimized well enough to not need or include DLSS and frame generation. 🤷♂️
If they use that stuff and it’s still a 2D platformer, holy fucking shit. 🤣
I need 800fps. One of my Steam games was 800+ fps on its HUD even though it was on a 60fps monitor. My GPU was going at 100%.
The game can run faster than the refresh rate; you just won’t be seeing more frames than 60 a second.
I paid for whole GPU.
DLAA then
deleted by creator
Work smarter, not harder.
Work smart and hard. :-)
Oh god this is going to be awesome to watch this crash and burn
Edit: Oh god I read it wrong, I thought it said the whole thing was going to be generated by AI
Leaving this as proof of my shame
Why do you want it to fail? I’m so happy that Sega is one of the companies who does games that are not mainstream boring stuff. In fact, this is something I would expect from a small indie team. Shouldn’t we celebrate that and support?
I’m h god I read it wrong! I thought he said the whole thing was going to be AI ack!
Ah I see, just a misunderstanding. Well then the balance of the force is restored. :D
I did that too at first lmao. With so many bad news about the opposite happening recently the brain just defaults to pessimism.
Not a single pixel. The code, however…
Watch… They’ll make money by virtue signalling “no AI use” and then the second AI inevitably goes mainstream pivot to showing off because they use “the best AI”. The trick is to make money no matter which way the wind blows.
LOL, it’s not exactly niche right now, my dude.
I guess I’m an outlier, I judge games on if they are fun to play.
There’s no shortage of games that are fun to play, you can just select for studios that don’t rely on the Grand Plagiarism Tool to get you to give them money
It’s not all plagiarism, though. For instance, Embark Studios uses AI to create in-game voice lines for characters in their games. They made their own models with actors hired specifically to train them.
They might have used them for fine-tuning, but there is no way that they produced enough samples to train a model from zero.
That’s kinda a different case than what everyone is referring to when they’re talking about this
However, it’s an interesting point: do we know those voice actors are being paid the same as if they did the lines all themselves or is this a studio cheaping out on paying actors to do the job?
There might have been a load of actors who turned the job down before they found someone desperate enough for the money or naive enough to not realise it will likely drive down wages for voice actors if this becomes commonplace.
AI is fascist. anything that uses AI supports fascism.
You aren’t an outlier. People judge art in a complex way including final product uniqueness and complexity. AI is just one factor. Hardcore anti AI crowd lives mostly in their own echo chamber.
Unfortunately you are not, that’s what most people do. We should all be including ethics in our purchases.
I do include ethics in my decisions. My ethics simply aren’t dictated by copyright juggernauts.
So all the individual artists who had their work scraped are juggernauts?
No. DeviantArt, Universal, Disney, Shutterstock, Instagram and friends are the juggernauts. Artists already gave it all away.
There isn’t a scenario where individual artists get a piece of that money. Legislation, if it comes, will protect data aggregators, record companies and Hollywood, with the aim of killing open source.
Google paid 60$ million for Reddit’s data and I still haven’t received my dollar. Google would also love it if training a model costs so much only they could afford to build a legal one.
So it’s okay to steal their work for AI and commercial profit because they posted it on the internet?
I’m saying they stopped owning it the moment they put it on the big websites and signed away their work by clicking the box at the end of the ToS. I don’t think it’s right, just how it is.
I see two choices:
Scrapping isn’t considered theft and we all get easy access to these new tools.
It’s considered theft and the new tools end up behind censored subscription models while shutter stock makes a shit load of money.
Paying every artists what they are worth is a logistical nightmare because of the amount of data needed. It simply won’t happen and isn’t a realistic scenario. It sucks but sticking your head in the sand and giving a soft monopoly to google and openai only helps google and openai.
I understand what you are saying, but it also assumes surrendering to AI. Many of us are planning to avoid, boycott, and fight that slop to our dying breath. AI needs to be unpopular and unprofitable. The technology isn’t going to disappear, but we can make sure it’s not socially acceptable to steal from or replace humans with expensive, inefficient, misanthropic, planet-killing software and hardware. Progress is being made and it’s important to understand that — just like crypto — this is a fight we can win.
I hope your boss won’t pay you, because that honestly sounds like a logistical nightmare! They’d need like specialized employees and stuff to pay people! Craaazy!
Same TBF, I don’t really care if AI was used as long as it is an enjoyable game and the usage of it doesn’t contrast from the game itself.
Being said, most the time when generative AI is used, it comes out sloppy and unenjoyable so if there is the genAI flag on the store page I will definitely give it a more thorough once over.
Procedural or structural AI though I don’t even bat an eye on. It’s whatever at that point we have used tools like that for years anyway and it’s never been a problem.
I think this still matters in a long term.
Good games tend to be made by big teams. That’s why when you hear about some auteur recruiting his own random team for a game, it ends up being a failed venture usually.
AI is often an effort to replace large teams with small ones, churning someone’s half-baked thoughts into code and art. The result is rarely human and inventive; and in a lot of ways, it tends to show in the end product.
I’m mostly thinking of indie devs and how it can let small teams do more. I think some of these tools are a real boon to the industry, it’s quickly becoming trivial to included animated cut scenes for example. I think the human and inventive part can still shine with competent devs.
I’m not advocating for shovelware here or games that are 90% AI, but a lot of teams that can’t afford certain dedicated positions would probably benefit from using it in some parts of their game.
If it isn’t noticable and gives us a better game, I’m more than willing to ignore the copyright companies constant wailing.
This is my take at well, but not just for gaming… AI is changing the landscape for all sorts of things. For example, if you wanted a serious, professional grammar, consistency, and similar checks of your novel you had to pay thousands of dollars for a professional editor to go over it.
Now you can just paste a single chapter at a time into a FREE AI tool and get all that and more.
Yet here we are: Still seeing grammatical mistakes, copy & paste oversights, and similar in brand new books. It costs nothing! Just use the AI FFS.
Checking a book with an AI chat bot uses up as much power/water as like 1/100th of streaming a YouTube Short. It’s not a big deal.
The Nebula Awards recently banned books that used AI for grammar checking. My take: “OK, so only books from big publishers are allowed, then?”
“We promise not to put turds in your punch bowl.”
“Uh, actually, I prefer to make my own choices. Give me a cup of the Poo-Punch and then I’ll decide if its worth drinking.”
This actually made me laugh out loud. 😆
Welcome to lemmy, your only allowed response to anything AI related is “AI bad”, otherwise the 20 or so people who actually use this platform will downvote your comment.
I’m so fucking pumped for new Ecco games. I loved the original on Genesis and it’s about damn time we get some fresh stuff in the series.
Even better with this statement
Genesis music is of its own genre. So good
The Yamaha chip (YM2612) really gave it a super grunge sound, perfect for games like Comix Zone. That said, it still felt at home with new age music like Ecco’s.
The fact that we had a synthesizer playing live music is still mesmerizing me.
Memory unlocked haha. I could literally smell the static on my old crt monitor when I read that!
It really, really does.
This song (All Good Times, by MelonadeM) isn’t from a game, rather it’s one of the demo songs included with Furnace, a chiptune tracker. And it goes so fucking hard:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQfSCvvqmXg
I hope they make an effort with the soundtrack. For me that was a big highlight on all games (specially Sega CD).
Undercaves song goes so hard
YESS. I’m super eager to hear the sounds they come up with here.
I remember getting irrationally pissed off at the genesis version when i was little lol. Great game though.
It’s the same kind of sadness that I feel knowing that a ton of YouTubers who would rather not show their face now have to just so that people know that they’re not a fucking clanker. Especially if they’re new at it and don’t have a backlog or community to prove that they’ve been around longer than the AI slop.
I knew that “No AI used” is going to become a huge selling point for many products. And I think this is just the start.
That’s excellent. And as these mega corps watch consumers favor those products. Maybe, just maybe they’ll fucking implode. That’s just a fantasy I know.
Unfortunately they won’t. They are earning tons of money.
Earningburning. Fixed it for you.The reality is software engineers will use AI or will find themselves out of work as they won’t have the skills to get hired.
Customers may never know if AI is used as a tool in game creation but it will always be part of any software and development studio.
Using AI for music or design assets is totally different from using it for the code base and blanket statements don’t improve the situation
I disagree with your statement, unfortunately.
While we don’t do game development, my company has investigated using gen ai for code and we found that it doesn’t reliably assist us in anything other than boilerplate code. I personally found that it hallucinates APIs on the regular which made it a massive waste for me as I basically had to go back and rewrite most of the code myself. Using gen ai for code reminded me of every time I’ve worked at a company that outsourced code; we rarely ever got what we asked for and by the time we got something usable it still wouldn’t be up to our standards, which generally resulted in scrapping what was delivered and having to rewrite the whole thing internally.
Using AI for code requires a high level of specificity, software houses that are getting the most out of it are not using it so much inline or vibe coding because as you say that leads to hallucinations or having to repeat yourself.
The common approach now is to use multiple agents with different responsibilities, the human effectively becomes a team leader and uses one chatbot to orchestrate a plan being very specific about the outcomes and the requirements and breaking the plan down into phases,
Another agent will be used to write the code, they will have set rules files to keep them on guard rails, they will check their work as they go and deliver a pull request at the end of it for the human to check and approve
The next agent will be there to write tests and check the work of the second agent.
It’s a lot more work than writing a single prompt and expecting a good outcome or close approximation, but it is getting better results now.
I could see a refusal to use codegen as a potential liability, but that’s not “skills”. The biggest thing about codegen is you have to review it and just lower your expectations that the code comes from a technique dumber than the dumbest human intern you have ever seen and approach it with supremely thorough skepticism. It’s exhausting how dumb it can be and how you have to be paranoid for every single piece of output. But it’s not a “skill”
I’m gonna have my kid add “No AI used” to his lemonade stand sign. He’ll probably double his profits.
(so like $4).
I made a post about thia exact thing a couple of weeks ago! I will give my money to people not using ai bullshit, and if theyre liars, they wont see a cent from me again. People need to stand up and have some damn principles about this.
And what’s funny is we all know they’re going to use it somewhere.
Nice
Not a single one. In fact it will be nothing less than all of the one’s
The zeros will be hand-made, however.
What about the code?
Written by an actual dolphin