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I agree. People keep suggesting Factorio, which leads me to believe that they have not actually read the post since his friend is into souls-likes and heavy combat games. Factorio is the antithesis of that! I don’t personally play those games (Factorio is one of my most played games), so I can’t make suggestions aside from Monster Hunter.
Consider me a psycho with a hot take, but I have always preferred games that mix the enemy difficulties around in a zone. Something like Ark where, sure, level 3 Dodos spawn on the starting beaches, but a level 70 Spino can spawn not far away and you have to be sure to skirt it lest you become a healthy snack. The steady progression of “zone difficulty” has always bugged me a bit because it is just so far off from realistic. Sure, close to a settlement there would be culling of particularly dangerous creatures, but some of them would still exist (if the settlement is being responsible). And yeah, as you get farther into the wilds those sorts of cullings would fall off rapidly, but to say that there would be areas where there are no easy monsters or no hard monsters, even in the wilds, is just not accurate.
Also, you get the same feeling of accomplishment, sometimes more, when you have died to hard monsters in starting areas a bunch of times then learned to skirt aggro properly, but then suddenly you come back after being out for a while and utterly decimate them. Just feels so good.
Nope, they are covered most of the time by what is known as the “corporate veil”.
Better explained than I can do here: https://federal-lawyer.com/when-can-a-ceo-be-held-personally-liable/
Essentially, unless they are personally doing it, they are protected. Embezzle millions and you go to jail, poison a water supply, kill thousands, give birth defects, cancer, and a myriad of other health issues to a community at large and only the corporation is liable/culpable.
Personally I want to see the criminal shield removed for corporations. All C-Level executives become personally liable for any illegal actions, malfeasance, slander/liable, or injurious action perpetrated or instigated by the company with the ONLY defense being proving, beyond a shadow of a doubt (not just reasonable doubt) that an actor within or without the company caused the action with the express intent of harming the C-Level executives, either specific or generally.
Fuck corporate personhood. Fuck people making a LLC and doing whatever the fuck they want under the guise of the company then the company declares bankruptcy while they run off like a cartoon character with bags of money. Leadership liability and culpability should be the norm, not the exception.
This is the central myth of “free speech” under the 1st Amendment.
The 1st Amendment only protects individuals exercising speech and expression from laws being passed or used to silence said speech or expression and from agents of the government abridging the rights. That is a lot, but it is also all. Private citizens are allowed to abridge each other’s speech as much as we like. Private companies can censor whatever they want. This is why the guy wrote a letter to Steam, because literally ANY larger action would have crossed the line.
Factorio: 2344
Path of Exile: 2736
Rimworld: 2191
Kerbal Space Program: 1071
I have a bunch of honorable mentions in the several hundred hours ranges that are only not 1k+ because I have severe ADHD and something else became a hyperfocus before they hit that point:
Backpack Hero
Ark
The Last Spell
Timberborn
Factory Town
Dyson Sphere Program
Loop Hero
Brotato
Satisfactory
Path of Achra
Against the Storm
Desynced
Gabe heads a company which is successful because it respects its employees, customers, and suppliers instead of constantly trying to marginalize and abuse them. They are not perfect by any means, but they do fit into the definition of ethical capitalism, which should not be understated. They don’t employ anticompetitive tactics like bribing/coercing developers into exclusivity contracts. They don’t operate with a bunch of 1099 contractors so they can avoid providing benefits. Etc.
I am getting really tired of these all these chucklefucks being in charge of things they patently do not understand. Modders are the modern lifeline of gaming. They work for free, fix your fuck-ups, and breath life into games that are years and sometimes decades old. Rimworld and Factorio both started their crowd funding campaigns in 2013, and both are wildly popular 11 years later, still selling copies. Factorio is just now coming out with their first expansion, and Rimworld just came out with their 4th. Neither Ludeon Studios (Rimworld) nor Wube Software (Factorio) have had ANY financial need to produce any other projects besides these games. Why are they so wildly profitable and evergreen? They both have rabid modding communities that have been supported and cultivated by the developers constantly fixing and expanding modding support to allow for an infinite variety of new content to be created for their games. Hell, the Vanilla Expanded team of Rimworld modders have actually turned it into a primary income source via Patreon.
AAA devs need to just sit down and thank these modders for tirelessly working on their games after release for free. Ever since DoTA became more popular than Warcraft 3, they all have their panties in a bunch and keep trying to claim ownership over all mods. No, bad developers smacks on the nose with a rolled up newspaper. God, it pisses me off to no end.
As far as I’m concerned the inclusion of the “anti-DoTA” clause in their EULA murdered it for me. I was so excited. KSP is one of my favorite games of all times, largely as a result of the vibrant and very technically advanced modding community. Same goes for essentially all of my favorites; Rimworld, Backpack Hero, Factorio. The free labor that expands the games in major ways extends the value of my money and let’s me have fun forever in them.
Putting in a clause in a EULA which automatically and irrevocably assumes all ownership and rights to any code or assets that are created for a game is just too far. Assuming rights at all is a huge issue for me, but I can accept that it is beneficial to assume royalty free licenses to the mods, I’ll even begrudgingly accept clauses that allow developers to gaffle features and optimizations from mods without giving remuneration or even acknowledgment. But wholesale ownership that revokes all rights and licenses for the independent 3rd party creator. Fuck that. I will never support a game that I find out is treating the people who keep games alive and relevant for decades for free like that.
Everything you said specifically excludes Valve and Steam from being a monopoly. The definition of monopoly includes the anticompetitive behaviors. They don’t give a fuck about competition. They don’t buy up everyone who could be a threat. They don’t push for exclusivity contracts on big upcoming games. They exist and work to continue to do so. That is how business is supposed to be.
Ok, I’m done trying to educate you. You, by your own admission, are lay on literally every topic that you are speaking about and I am literally an expert. I have put in my thousand hours on modeling, animation, and VFX, as well as hundreds of hours on quest design for TTRPGs. I have a master’s degree in Animation and a bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics. I am professionally a developer and am actively designing AIs. Why the hell are you arguing with me on what is and is not possible? You know nothing but what you have read in a few pop-sci articles and blogs along with some observations from playing games. I have all of that too, plus everything else. Your opinions are based on incorrect assumptions that invalidate them from the start. If you can provide me a single scholarly article, published in a journal in the last 2 years that supports a single one of your assertions, I will yield on whatever you are able to support. Hell, I will even take a passage from a textbook on AI design published in the last year. I have already provided support for some of my assertions. Please provide some of yours. Again, scholarly publication. Not blog. Not pop-sci articles. A recent whitepaper from a research group is also acceptable.
The only reason I support them as a monopoly is because they are the closest thing to an ethical/moral capitalist company around. They are proof positive that treating employees, customers, and vendors fairly can lead to an obscenely strong company with profit margins that the amoral assholes out there looking for every way to shaft everyone to make an extra penny can are envious of.
From what I understand discussing the issue with friends who run game studios and deal with Valve/Steam, the employees pretty much have his mindset from the bottom to the top of the org chart. He has been smart in who he hires and who is promoted so leadership is not a bunch of sniveling money grubbers who will sell out immediately when he retires. 🤞
Your response style is not rude. It is disingenuous confirmation hunting cherry picking. I addressed everything in your response in detail, but you latched on to the qualifiers and clarifications because those are the parts that satisfy your confirmation bias, even though in the full context they mean quite the opposite. I also am recognizing that you are not a dev, not a game designer, not an AI architect nor mathematician, or a computer scientist. All of this means that the scope and breadth of your understanding of the topic you are attempting to belittle and demean is myopic at best. It is obvious that you do not understand what a “quest” in a game is nor what it takes to craft or write one. It is clear that you have 0 understanding of how LLM or AIs as a larger topic function or generate information. You deign to belittle the work that I am doing on this topic without asking a single question or clarifying a single detail from me. I’m sure you are getting a nosebleed for your perch on Mt. Dunning-Kruger. I can see you from my position on the adjacent slope. I will humor you though, since you seem to at least care about the topic, even though you seem utterly incapable of recognizing when something should be informative and educational.
What is a “quest” in a game: The abstract of this article covers some key concepts of both current anf potential future paradigms of quest design in video games. Currently, quests, even handcrafted ones, consist of a list of tasks. Lists of tasks are text. Well-crafted ones include lore hooks, personal interactions with a variety of NPCs, tasks that are meaningful to the world, and rewards/results that either expand the player’s capabilities or draw the player into the world and the story. Components needed to craft a quest are a means of initiating the quest for the player (quest givers, discovered information like a letter or journal, an event that happens in the player’s presence), dialog, goals/tasks, and a location. For a well-made persistent world, locations, and NPCs are persistent as well. They don’t need to be AI-crafted on the fly. They should have been created when the game was made, or at least some period long before the players interacted with them. What can be crafted as a just-in-time or an emergent experience is the interaction with the player. Dialog with lore hooks that give the quest grounded footing in the world. Interactions with other NPCs which are based with the relationships of the NPCs with each other instead of just the player, etc. All of this is textual in nature. Dialog, relationships, interaction. The secondary stuff, like animations, could be handled in a lot of clever ways. They could be hand-crafted by animators and an AI could be trained on what animation links to what interaction type. The AI then selects and blends the canned animations when it is interacting with the player. And before you have something to say about that, it is literally how animation is done now by people. I absolutely have authority on this topic as I have a graduate degree in animation and visual effects. The AI I am working to create currently is being designed around the goal of making a consistent world with complex relationships and personalities so quests can be written that are self-consistent and coherent with the world. It is not worried about writing dialog or generating rewards, just making a world and quests that are cogent and have minimal plot holes.
What isn’t part of a quest? Geometry, models, textures, particles, VFX, rooms, people, trees, animals… basically anything that has physical form or defines a physical characteristic of an object. These things may be involved in the completion of the tasks themselves, but they are all separate from the quest. As an analog, your wife hands you a grocery list and asks you to go to the store to pick up the things she needs for dinner. This would constitute your bog-standard fetch quest in a video game. The quest is to obtain the listed items. All of the items exist independently of the quest. The grocer and cashier at the till do as well. As does your wife. The only thing that the quest consists of is the request which is made, and the list which is requested. Everything else does not need to be created, it already exists. I hope that clears up your misunderstanding of the topic.
You can erase the entire concept of modeling or texturing from your mind in relation to an AI creating quests. I mentioned it because I recognise that some objects may need to be created. Perhaps your wife asks for a product which the store did not contain already. So in a gaming context, this should be cleaned up so the quest is able to be completed. The product needs to be created. You can place limits on the list of items so they are all canned goods. Now you have a rudimentary prototype object that can be anything. Canned beans, sure. Canned orc tongue, why not? All that is needed is a label and a spot on a shelf. SD can create a label in a few seconds while the player moves from his home to the store and an observation-aware procedural system can stock it on the shelves when no players are looking and inform the AI driving the cashier of the existence and location of the item. Nothing needed modeled. Hell, all that was really needed was a procedural text generator to make a label for the can, no AI was needed for that. What the AI is needed for to make the trip to the grocery feel right is the request from your wife, the conversation with the cashier at checkout, and the smile and thanks from your wife when you got home with the items.
If more modeling is needed, procedural modeling takes care of that. Artists create prototype objects with fixed bounds on parameters and an AI is trained on how to set those parameters, so whenever a quest needs an item, the quest generation AI requests the type if item and the context in which it will be used, and the modeling AI interprets the request, prepares the correct prototype, determines the contextually appropriate parameters for it, then places it where the quest giver needs it. No muss, no fuss. Eventually, there will be SD analogs for 3D geometry and generative modeling. It is a field of active research at IBM, nVidia, AMD, Meta, and many others. It will happen, and it will happen sooner than anyone will be ready for it, much like SD. But for now, it is overkill. AIs can use procedural modeling to adequately furnish and populate a world without much overhead. I think I may play with that as well. Rip the character creator from the likes of Skyrim or Starfield and train an AI on faces and the character creator parameterization and have it go wild. The AI is still creating the characters, it is just using the same tool as the player to do so.
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.
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.
While I don’t disagree with you in spirit, the use case for most instances of the expression are to dissuade the act of comparison at all because the two quantities are so dissimilar that the correlations are irrelevant.
It is an anti-intellectual statement because it presupposes that the person doing the comparing is not able to distinguish between meaningful comparisons and ones which are irrational but support their argument. It ranks up there with “big words” as far as I am concerned, saying more about the person they are being said by rather than the person they are being said to.
Except you just compared them in saying they are both fruit. In fact, saying they are both fruit is finding a commonality between them when comparing. There are many metrics on which Apples and Oranges can be compared. They are different colors, have a different internal structures, and different juice content. These are negatively correlated comparisons. More positive correlations would be that they are both roughly spherical, provide vitamin C, and grow on trees.
I have always hated that expression. You can compare anything since comparison is just the act of identifying similarities and differences (positive and negative correlations). One can make meaningful comparisons between and apple and a suspension bridge if the situation calls for it.
We are talking about the country who’s leaders tried to ban flat chested women from porn because they “look too much like children”.