• 0 Posts
  • 17 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle
  • 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?



  • 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.


  • Okay I won’t even read past the first paragraph because you’re so incredibly wrong that it hurts.

    First generation LLMs were bad at writing long batches of code, today we’re on the fourth (or by some metric, fifth) generation.

    I’ve trained LLM agents on massive codebases that resulted in <0.1% fault ratio on first pass. Besides, tool calling is a thing, but I guess if I started detailing how MCP servers work and how they can be utilised to ensure an LLM agents doesn’t do incorrect calls, you’d come up with another 2-3 year old argument that simply doesn’t have a foot to stand on today.



  • By improving the cadence of projects.

    A project costs X amount because of the standard template of pay per time unit Y multiplied by timeframe in time unit Z.

    Simply said if you have 100 people working on the project, that costs 100Y per hour. If the project takes 6 months (approx. 960 hours), you multiply the two and get that your costs are 96000Y.

    Now the two ways to reduce this is to either reduce the number of employees, with AI you can get rid of maybe 2/3, reducing the expenses to 32000Y…

    Or since AI speeds up almost every workflow by about 8 to 10 times, you can keep all the people, but cut down project time from 6 months to about 2 months, which doesn’t just reduce the expenses by the same 2/3 but also increases potential profits for the same 6 month period by 200%, as instead of one product you’re releasing three.

    Cutting jobs ain’t the only way to reduce costs with AI.



  • How do you think most game scripting engines work?

    Nowadays game engines don’t rely on strictly speaking hardcoded behaviour, but rather are themselves just a scripting environment to execute a specific format of code.

    Skyrim is still the perfect example because it gives you the ability to literally do anything in the world, via a scripting language.

    Instructing NPCs to behave in a specific way is also done through these scripts. And LLMs - especially coding fine-tuned ones which could be tied into the execution chain - can easily translate things like <npc paces around> to specific instructions so the NPC walks up and down at a specific distance or in a circle or whatever you want it to do.

    You’re seriously over-estimating the work it takes on even crappy, but modern engines to get certain things to happen. Especially when it comes to things that are already dynamically scripted. Like NPCs.



  • Which is a different article about a (somewhat) unrelated topic.

    Using AI for development is already out there, and you can’t put that genie back in the bottle. As an engineer I’m already using it in my daily work for tons of things - I’ve built separate agents to do a number of things:

    • read work tickets, collate resources, create a work plan, do the initial footwork (creating branches, moving tickets to the right states, creating Notion document with work plan and resources)
    • read relevant changes in UI design documents and plan + execute changes (still needs some manual review but e.g. with Android Jetpack Compose, it makes 90-95% of the needed work and requires minimal touch-up)
    • do structural work - boilerplates, etc.
    • write unit and integration tests, and already working out a UI test automation agent
    • do code reviews on changes, document them, and write appropriate commit messages
    • do PR reviews - I still review them myself but an extra eye is always helpful

    guess what, AI didn’t replace me, it just allowed me to focus on actually thinking up solutions instead of doing hours of boilerplate stuff.

    AI isn’t the enemy in software development. Companies who think they can replace engineers with AI. Middle managers will sooner be on that date, as they were mostly useless anyway.





  • That’s… not what this is about?

    The point of integrating AI into games is to provide further diversity within the game.

    Think Skyrim. By default you’re limited to 3-4 discussion options, right? Imagine now, if you will, that you could just… type in anything, including emotional markers, and have the characters respond interactively to the statement and tone. No longer are you bound by limited dialogue in RPGs.

    visual generative AI will just spice up the visuals - hopefully. Things like repetitive textures and such will disappear as the game generates brand new textures for each grid element. Or create tons of background characters without the need to specify them. The list goes on.


  • apologies, the video wouldn’t load so I presumed it was one of the in-depth rants about how Trump is just a symptom and how others are in control.

    I also seriously misread the OOP, but in my defense it was 3am and I’ve been running on 2-3hr of sleep a day for a while now.

    And yes, my account was inactive for a while as the federated Reddit alternatives haven’t been teeming with much content or discourse when I original joined, and a recent Reddit ban that nuked all my alts was the trigger to continue moving back here. Alas not a bot and I’ve been using this nickname for the better part of the past ~25 years.


  • While you’re not wrong that Trump is just a puppet for a number of masters in various hierarchies, there’s one key attribute he has that makes him indispensable - the cult he managed to build.

    With him gone, do you really think that any of the current replacements being fostered could actually get anywhere with MAGA? Do you think that any of the people in question, let it be one of the Trump kids or JD Vance or quite literally anyone from his inner circles, replace him as the cult leader?

    Trump is uniquely positioned as both the executor of the will of this cabal, and the cult leader of the morons. With him gone, the cabal will be hard pressed to push for another candidate who can move even remotely as many voters as the orange turdsack did.

    With Trump gone, so will be the MAGA movement, and said cabal will be back to, well, not square one, but it will be a major setback until they can find another mascot who can charisma the moron third into voting against their own interest.

    And that gap, that few years will allow for a crucial thing: “re-education”. With Trump gone, the MAGA followers will be able to re-evaluate their stances more freely, with reduced effects from e.g. sunk cost fallacy, and can be taught to recognise populism and how it actually negatively affects them by preying on their weaknesses.