• 1 Post
  • 207 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 4th, 2023

help-circle
  • See Skyrim NPCs with AI and Skyrim remastered by AI.

    The first video in the search results in the first link here has “it got weird fast” in the title and NPCs are breaking the third wall and responding strangely to things in general. (The lady at the orphanage mentioned the player “looking through a flickering screen.” I didn’t watch much further than that.)

    The second is likely heavily curated and variables very strictly controlled. The characters are perfectly centered in frame and standing mostly still aside from idle animations. The landscapes are… well, they’re inherently still life. There’s no actual gameplay showcased, and there’s no indication from the video just how many of the video creator’s attempts had major issues like too many fingers or were scrapped in favor of the ones that turned out better. The art style switches strangely between characters, with, for instance, the first one looking much more photographic and the second mimicking more what you’d get from a better-quality 3D render. And many of the characters feel very uncanny valley. (The third one, for instance. I haven’t watched that video much further than that either.)

    So, yeah, if those videos are “testing it to see if it works”, the answer is a resounding “no”. There’s nothing workable there, and no indication LLMs and Stable Diffusion are a step in the right direction, despite what Nvidia might tell you.

    I mean, do you watch those videos and think to yourself “this is it – this is the destination – we’ve done it”?

    So no it’s not the same as what is driving the current bubble lol.

    I mean, there’s no there there, and no reason to think there ever will be beyond the fact that humans seem pretty intent on developing AGI. Clearly what AI can do now isn’t any kind of boon. So what’s keeping people high on hype if not empty hopes for a breakthrough in the near future?

    if you don’t believe that understanding and responding to complex text requires some basic level of reasoning and intelligence.

    That’s the opposite of what I said. The kind of real-time dynamic responding to things you’re talking about requires reasoning and intelligence, but LLMs possess neither.


  • Well that is the neat part, at least for in-game dialogue, hallucinations wouldn’t be a problem at all lol.

    It will be if half of what is hallucinates is quests that the rest of the game fails to actually implement. NPC: “Yes, you’re absolutely right, I misidrected you to a ‘Satin Forrest’ that you spent two hours wandering around trying to find. I actually meant to say that the Dryad Queen is waiting to be rescued in the ‘Cashmere Forrest’ that I totally, 100% guarantee exists for real this time.”

    what an LLM could provide on top of that is “understanding” and reasoning

    No. Just no. “Understanding” and “reasoning” are not things that LLMs can do. They can decide what word (or phrase or part-of-a-word or whatever) statistically follows the usual pattern given the training data. It’s not the magic you make it out to be.

    See this…

    Guarantee that took huge amounts of some combination of babysitting, editing, fraud, and/or other things that make it completely unsuitable for generating reliably-sensical cutscenes that dynamically respond to in-game events that the devs never accounted specifically for.

    people do not see potential

    That’s exactly the problem. It’s all empty promises of something “just around the corner”. And that’s all that’s driving the bubble. Fantasies about a super-unrealistic futures in which some completely vague and hypothetical advancement makes it actually work for something useful. I don’t believe the technologies we have now will ever fulfill those super-unrealistic promises. And as I said, if something fulfills those promises one day, I doubt the inner workings of whatever does will resemble an LLM or Stable Diffusion or whatever. If we want something that can generate game content on the fly, we’re very much barking up the wrong tree trying to somehow make LLMs do that.

    it’s clear what could be possible.

    That’s just straight up self-deception.

    Instead of just generative AI, you render a skeleton animated character but it uses the last step of the AI output and skins that, and it looks as good as AI generated.

    You haven’t seen a lot of those “fail” videos where some Twitch streamer’s beauty filter fails and flickers, have you?

    I’m not 100% sure this is possible though, but pretty sure.

    I’m not 100% sure this is impossible though, but pretty sure.

    On AGI I make no predictions.

    Me neither except that a) LLMs aren’t it and b) I think anything that could pull off the kind of dynamically-responsive realtime game content generation that you’re talking about would pretty much have to meet most reasonable definitions of “AGI”. And I doubt anything short of that in a game would be a net benefit to immersiveness. (*Maybe if the LLM had super limited scope somehow… like generating short stories that you’d find in random books around the game like the books you find in the Elder Scrolls games or something, but even that seems super iffy.) Mind you, I probably would still opt out of that if it was a thing. (For the same reason as I’d never touch anything with loot boxes – I don’t trust game studios not to take advantage of me to try to addict me to their products.)



  • Smaller LLM models could be great for expanding dialog options in game.

    I don’t think LLMs (smaller or otherwise) can ever clear the uncanny valley. The level of adaptability you’re taking about but without hallucinations and random batshit-crazy behavior requires something humans haven’t invented yet and that we have no specific reason will ever happen. (In fact, I think if we can be said to be on a path toward building the first AGI, I believe LLMs and “generative AI” and this whole hype bubble will be looked back on as having been a diversion/destraction from that path that delayed the advent of AGI.)

    Unless/until that someday happens, I’d much rather play, and feel like I’d find much more immersive, a game that generated, say, fetch-quests with something like My {rand("health","Lord","wife","none-of-yor-business",...)} {rand("demands","begs","commissions",...)} you to bring a {rand("tufted titmouse","Gauntlet of Light","turkey dinner","giant's toenail",...)} that you can find in/at {rand("Illsword Manor","The Cavern of Lies","the afterlife",...)} to {rand("the illfated dragon","Fenworth Blurd","The Rusty Scabbard Inn",...)} in {rand("Feyspring Vale","Weston","the northern wilderness",...)}. than something with the problems inherent to LLMs.

    I suppose I can agree that I’d be interested in new technologies that make gaming more immersive, but “smart” NPCs that can improvise and riff while not ruining the immersion like LLMs would seem so speculative and far off that I might as well wish to stumble into the possession of a genie lamp a la Disney’s Aladdin while I’m at it. Meanwhile, grifters are making shit-tons of money at your expense promising you just that.

    AGI has been only ten years away for the last fifty years. Anyone who says it’s less than ten years away now is trying to sell you a bridge.

    As for the “filling out assets” and “increased diversity at least at the high end”, I think you’re overestimating the capabilities of (at least current) generative AI. And if you’re not, there are still a lot of legal issues with generative AI, and no matter which way those legal issues end up being decided, we can expect shitty results for consumers and competitors. (I fear, for instance, that the output of generative AI may be subject to copyright when big companies want it to be and not when lawsuits go in the other direction.)



  • I’m thrilled to hear it.

    I do have to wonder, though, if there isn’t a minority of gamers who are completely taken by the hype of AI in gaming.

    Like, one of the last few shitty scam-bubbles to intersect with gaming gave us those ridiculous NFT games where you could play the game for blockchain monopoly money or whatever. And at the time, the folks who were super into that shit were super visible and vocal on social media (YouTube and such).

    But I honestly have yet to hear a single gamer say “AI is the best thing that has ever happened to vidja-games.” Obviously I’ve heard that ad nauseam from, say, Nvidia, but I’ve never heard it from someone who wasn’t directly working for the companies at the heart of the whole AI bubble itself.

    Maybe it’s just because the AI bubble doesn’t create “bag-holders” the same way blockchain did. With blockchain, there were definitely a whole lot of people making insanely optimistic claims about such-and-such shitcoin or whatever just because the hype-er was heavily invested and was trying to drive their own assets up in price. It recruited every participant in the economy into selling the grift in the process of being grifted themselves. But with AI, maybe mostly it’s only the big companies trying to sell the grift.

    Which perhaps is reason for optimism in itself.





  • I was recently reminded of Shining in the Darkness for the Mega Drive and got super nostalgic. I might have to play that again.

    The same thing recently happened to me with Descent 3. I’d never played Descent 1 or 2, so I figured if I was going to replay Descent 3, I ought to play the other two first, so I’m currently working my way through Descent 1.

    But more to the heart of your question:

    • Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force
    • SimCopter (super buggy, but fun none-the-less.)
    • OpenTTD
    • Mindustry
    • Luanti

  • A phone! That honestly changes everything.

    I haven’t really messed with any distros well suited for a touch-screen interface (and no keyboard/mouse)… except Ubuntu Touch. I’ve got it on my Google Pixel 3a.

    I’m pretty happy with it. But it’s not like a Linux desktop at all. It’s not really set up to run, say, Libreoffice or Gimp or whatever. I’ve only used the built-in browser and haven’t tried any of the other browsers available, but the built-in one is very “mobile-brower-app-y” rather than anything like a desktop browser… It’s got apps and an app store like Android/iOS has apps and an app store. The ecosystem around it is way more open than either Android or iOS. (Like, you don’t have to register with anyone to side-load things.) And the kernel is Linux, not Android or anything. (There is a way with Waydroid to run Android apps on Ubuntu Touch, but I haven’t tried it.)

    There are other Linux-based OSs meant for phones like PostmarketOS, but another thing about the phone distros is that device support is going to be very specific. You’ll want to buy one of the very few devices that is well supported by the distro you want.

    So, whether Linux is good for you definitely depends on what you’re wanting more specifically.


  • Yeah, the ARM situation is pretty impressive now-a-days.

    Again, I mostly know about Raspberry Pis (RPi 4’s specifically) and those are mostly pretty low-power/low-CPU-speed kind of devices. And so there are some limitations with regard to just how much “oomph” the Raspberry Pi has. Not because it’s an ARM device rather than an AMD64 device so much as because it’s really cheap (which is both a feature and a bug) and low-power. For example, last time I tried using Chromium, I found it nearly unusable for how slow it ran, but Firefox works great. (Though I do turn off things like smooth scrolling animations and such just to lower how much CPU it uses. It’s still “regular Firefox”, though. Not some “minimal” fork like Fennec or anything.) But again, that’s mostly because the Raspberry Pi is low power, not because it’s ARM. But the Raspberry Pi also has good 3d graphics support, so Luanti runs surprisingly well and very playably. I’m also kindof a terminal-or-die kind of guy, so not using heavy GUI apps isn’t much of a problem for me.

    But as to the issues that are specific to the fact it’s ARM rather than AMD64, there are very few now-a-days. Binaries, for instance aren’t portable between ARM and AMD64, of course. Very few application just straight up don’t even run on ARM. (Cura is the only one that comes to mind, and it’s been a long time since I tried it, so that might have changed by now. Cura’s kindof a terrible piece of software, though. Good slicer, but the way they just don’t have any interest in making it cleanly/easily runnable on various systems makes it a huge pain to the point that some Linux distros (Gentoo, for instance) have given up supporting it even on AMD64.) I’ve never tried to run Wine on a Raspberry Pi, but it looks like there are options for doing so, and running x86 and AMD64 applications on it. But basically every feature of your browser (including streaming video and WebGL and stuff) works as expected (again, depending on how powerful your ARM device is). Aside from problems with Arch Linux Arm, whatever distro you settle on will have great support for the apps you’re used to using on AMD64. And you’ll have your choice of DE/WM the same as you do on AMD64. Etc.

    Oh, I guess one more caveat I’ll mention. Some of the Raspberry Pi’s RPi-specific hardware tends to change a lot over time. The drivers update and there are new ways of doing things that don’t work quite the way they used to. The main places I’ve seen that happen are in the audio drivers (after one update, the audio didn’t work and I had to go down a bit of a rabbit hole to get that working again), the graphics drivers (a few years ago, they released FOSS graphics drivers for the RPi and that changed some of the options available and such, and the main symptom I’ve seen of that is that documentation may be out-of-date and apply only to the old way the graphics drivers work, so it’s definitely worth making sure you know roughly when changes have taken place and that you’re looking at documentation that applies to the latest), some of the miscellaneous boot parameters (on Raspberry Pis, there’s a /boot/firmware/config.txt file that has a bunch of boot-level kernel options), and GPIO pin access.

    Which leads me to something else I didn’t think of until just now. The bootloader, driver options, kernel options, and the installation process tend to work differently for ARM devices. With AMD64, you kindof expect UEFI (possibly with legacy BIOS support) to be the norm. With ARM that’s rarely if ever the case. I don’t know that secure boot is likely to be available for very may ARM devices. Disk encryption isn’t something I’ve gone to the trouble to figure out how you’d do. You don’t use Grub, you use U-Boot, or in cases like the Raspberry Pi, the bootloader is kindof hidden away from you except that as you install it and configure it, the kernel/config/driver files go in the right place on the SD card to make sure the bootloader can find them. And the installation process tends to be “stick an SD card into another computer, DD this disk image onto it, and stick it into the target ARM device”. Depending which distro you’re using, from there it might take you into an interactive installer kind of thing (like with Raspian) or it may be more low-level (like with Arch.) And if you follow the default installation instructions for your distro, you most likely end up with a little less control over things like the partition layout, whether you’re using LVM or BTRFS, etc. If you wanted root- or home-partition encryption, my guess is you might have to take an existing installation disk image, dissect it, and build a custom disk image with certain partitions encrypted out of the result before DD’ing it to the SD card. (Ok, I took a break here to check and see if there are guides on how to do full disk encryption on a Raspberry Pi and there are.)

    (Side note. You may have to decide when installing a distro on an ARM machine whether you want the 32-bit ARM distro or the 64-bit ARM distro. If you want to run on an older ARM device that doesn’t support 64-bit ARM, you’ll have to go with the 32-bit ARM distro. If you want to run x86 Windows apps on Wine, it’s definitely recommended to use the 32-bit ARM distro. Otherwise, 64-bit is the way to go.)

    Ok. Jeez. This ended up being a long post. That’s about all I can think to say at the moment.


  • I wish I could recommend Arch Linux Arm, but it’s really poorly maintained. Literally zero packages available for update for months on end. And no hope of improvement in sight.

    My experience is mostly with Raspberry Pis. (I’m typing this on a Raspberry Pi in fact.) I still have a couple of Pis on Arch. And the one I’m on right now is running Raspian. I have plans to migrate them all to Gentoo some day, but I want to build a build server first and I’m currently deep in another project. I’ll get to it eventually.

    Raspian is boring and maybe a little simplified and restricted. But it’s fine.


  • I’m really happy with my Pixel 3a. (And I think the Pixel 3a XL is just as well supported by FLOSS ROMs but with a bigger screen.) It mostly checks all the boxes you had in your list, and I think it’s probably the only real option you’re going to find in that price range.

    I ran Lineage for a good while, but I’ve switched to Ubuntu Touch more recently. It’s incredibly well supported by both operating systems and just from what I’ve seen, most FLOSS ROMs tend to support it. (One exception I know of is PostmarketOS, which last I heard didn’t support the 3a very well at all.) Being honest, Ubuntu Touch’s app availability is pretty abysmal. Writing apps for Ubuntu Touch seems more accessible than for Android, though (especially now with the bullshit that they’ve pulled with sideloading restrictions.)

    One caveat: If you’re looking for 100% FLOSS, probably the 3a isn’t what you want. Even Ubuntu Touch uses a bunch of proprietary driver blobs. But again, the options for fully FLOSS-compatible phones seem pretty pricey.



  • Honestly, I’m starting to think in terms of what really would it look like to not use a (Firefox- or Webkit-based) browser any more.

    Aside from random one-off things I wouldn’t know I wanted to use until I wanted to use it, a few things I’d want to be able to use on my desktop Gentoo machine:

    • Discord (without installing the proprietary dedicated app, though I don’t currently give a fuck about video or audio – just chat)
    • Lemmy (I might literally write my own client if necessary, but I’m curious about Neon Modem)
    • YouTube (Minitube’s not terrible)
    • Wikipedia (Dillo would probably work ok for Wikipedia, though I’d definitely lose features like link hovering previous and such)
    • Twitch (No idea how to do that yet)
    • Gmail (Mutt, maybe? Though, honestly, I should quit Gmail and get another provider anyway.)
    • Various relatively-mainstream news sites and blogs (Dillo? RSS readers?)

    There are probably plenty of things I’m not thinking of. We’ll see if I ever do that or not.



  • Point Crow or Summoning Salt? Either way, I hadn’t heard anything.

    I do know Point Crow used to do a lot of content of games like Breath of the Wild with mods that would do things like multiplayer mode or “the floor is lava”. And Nintendo recently got YouTube to mass delete lots of modded Nintendo game content. (I don’t think mods of Nintendo games are even illegal, but Nintendo is known for calling the perfectly legal illegal.) And Point Crow’s channel was pretty hard hit because that made up a lot of his content.

    Man. Maybe I should consider boycotting YouTube. Heh.

    Edit: Oh. Speedrunner historian guy. You’re asking about Summoning Salt. I can’t read. Yeah, I don’t know anything, but I’ll look into it. You’re not thinking of Karl Jobst, are you? He was sued by Billy Mitchell, but Mitchell is 100% provably in the wrong. And a liar. And a scammer. And a cheating cheater who cheats. (If you aren’t familiar with Mitchell, I recommend starting with the documentary “King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters”.) Also, unless you’ve heard something I haven’t, I would recommend Jobst’s channel. It’s mostly about cheaters in e-sports and speedrunning.


    • I wouldn’t want to encourage others to patronize WotC. (And, if I’m running a 5e campaign - which I did for a short time - players who want to play are going to want books even if only the PHB.) So I wouldn’t want to run 5e. I might play 5e as a player if invited. But I’m kindof a “forever GM.”
    • Yeah, I’m good with acquiring stuff in ways that doesn’t support WotC. I don’t consider buying used to be permissable, however. If I buy used, that’s one used copy that won’t be available to someone else who may instead resort to buying new from WotC. And WotC profits directly from DM’s Guild. Piracy is the only way I’d be ok with it. (And if I don’t want to run 5e, and given that I already have all the core books, the only WotC content I’d be interested in pirating would be Eberron stuff. If I wanted to support Keith Baker without supporting WotC/DM’s Guild, I could just pirate and join Baker’s Patreon. Assuming I can find a good place to pirate that stuff from, of course.)
    • I specifically do want to participate in TTRPG ecosystems that are more explicitly dedicated to more sane licensing schemes and have very explicitly Ulysses Pact’ed themselves in no-takebacksies ways. Like maybe Paizo/Pathfinder 2e for instance. (I’m currently between groups… and have yet to acquire the PF2e books… and honestly am enjoying a bit of a hiatus from GMing… but when I get back to it, I’d love to do either PF2e or… I dunno. Something not 5e. Even though the 5e system is pretty decent, I think.)
    • There was a short period of time during which I thought WotC was backing down after the OGL 2.0 debacle, and if they hadn’t immediately proved themselves 100% evil with the Pinkerton fiasco, I would have ended my boycott. But they did, so my boycott remains.
    • I haven’t seen the D&D movie, nor do I intend to. And I’m not just boycotting WotC. I’m boycotting Hasbro. So, no Transformers movies either.

  • Well, I guess just to list off who I watch frequently, kinda sorted into categories:

    TTRPG:

    • Critical Role - Really famous. Live-play of TTRPGs. It’s really a huge investment of time to keep up with it, though.

    Just people I have parasocial relarionships with:

    • Any Austin - Kinda “philosophy of gaming” is how I’d describe his latest content. I’ve been a huge fan of his for many many years and am way more invested in him than the content he currently makes. But he’s really fascinating. His alternate channel “The Excellent Man From Minneapolis” is music he writes/records. Good stuff as well IMO.
    • Memoria - Gaming entertainment content. Found her when she was featured on Austin’s channel.
    • gl;hf - A podcast that Austin and Memoria do together. It’s about everything and nothing.

    Long form deep dive investigative and social commentary stuff:

    • OKI’s Weird Stories - Cool expos on things like conspiracy theories and cults.
    • Fredrik Knudson - Similar cool expos on things like gaming communities, fandoms, niche infamous figures, scientific experiments, etc.
    • Folding Ideas - Somewhere between expos and social commentary. Does stuff about flat earthers, gold, cryptocurrency, etc.
    • Contrapoints - Insightful and really well-edited/highly-prodiced left-wing social commentary stuff.
    • Philosophy Tube - Quite similar to Contrapoints but different. I’d imagine if you like one, you’d like both.
    • Munecat - Also similar to Contrapoints and Philosophy tube.
    • Innuendo Studios - Maybe discontinued, but really really good source for info on how the alt-right “works” and how to fix (particularly American) fascism.

    Tech/hacking:

    • Ben Jordan - Stuff about privacy, police tech, fighting scraping for gen-ai training, etc. Informative.
    • Marcin Plaza - Hobbyist mobile computing device prototyping. Quite entertaining as well.
    • James Channel - Fucking hillarious. Mostly game system modding content, but way funnier than that makes him sound.

    Satanism:

    • The Satanic Grotto - A small satanist group based in Kansas that made the national news big time not too long ago holding a “black mass” at the state capitol. I’m just fascinated by all the legal fallout of the whole thing. And… I think the Satanic Grotto is the good guys. “Part of the solution” if you will.
    • Behemoth X - Just really dark and atmospheric content about rituals to commune with demons. Dude 100% believes demons are real and powerful and he does blood sacrifices to them and talks about what wisdom he claims they’ve shared with him. Also life advice. Lol. Really interesting. Only major downside to the guy: he’s really leaned into using AI art in his videos lately. It’s pretty cringe.

    Other creepy stuff:

    • Tales From The Trip! - Substance use trip reports. Only bad trip reports.
    • Night Mind - Essays on horror media. Mostly video games and ARGs.
    • Nexpo - Similar to Night Mind, but occasionally does stories about grisly murders or creepy cults.
    • blameitonjorge - Similar to the above, but with a lot of focus on lost media.
    • Nick Crowley - Mostly creepy internet and TV history rabbit holes.

    Vidja gaming content:

    • Summoning Salt: History of speedrun world records. Way more interesting than it sounds.
    • Pointcrow - Bit of a guilty pleasure. Popular Twitch streamer who does speedruns and challenge runs and stuff. Quite entertaining, but a bit sophmoric.

    I’m sure I could think of more if I thought for a bit. I should mention that I don’t usually log in to YouTube. I keep my subscribed-to list in NewPipe on my phone. But I also do a fair amount of just searching by topic or happening across YouTube content on Lemmy or Hackaday.