AI NPCs Have Potential, But Not The Kind Big Video Game Companies Want

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AI NPCs Have Potential, But Not The Kind Big Video Game Companies Want - Aftermath
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If you want it to be good, it will still take hard work. Your own training data, your own ideas, your own work. There's no way to do anything worthwhile with an LLM that takes no work or thought.

This. AIs are basically garbage in, garbage out systems. More general an AI system harder it will be tailor to a specific game. That means companies will need their own training data to supplement it. AI is not “plug anywhere, do anything” type of a solution.

I think the best use for it I've heard is to make unnamed generic characters sound like more than 3 voice actors greeting you with the same 20 or so lines.

My cousin's out fighting dragons, and what do I get? Guard duty.

And they can react to in-game state as well

If every action produces logs and the logs are given to every npc along with some flags, suddenly,

Just punched a guard? That goes in the context

Player is rich? That's in the context

Wearing mage clothes? Context

It's a cool way to increase immersion for not much effort without breaking anything in a traditional game

something i dont see being talked about is the sheer processing power needed for this.

how are they gonna solve that? just requiring you to casually have a couple 4090s?

They'll require a persistent online connection for cloud compute.

Imagine now NPCs in gaming being bound to always being online and a company can choose to turn the cloud computing off for the npcs making the game unplayable after like a year, can't wait /s

That seems bound to loose them money if they don't charge a subscription.

They're salivating at the idea of making you pay a subscription for this.

Piracy is gonna get more interesting.

Cracked, removed AI Server lock, bring your own API key, or host model of choice locally.

Known Issues: If you use the OpenAI API, the NPCs will sometimes tell you that killing is against the ethics policy while shooting at you.

Training the models initially is expensive, but running them can be done on commodity hardware nowadays.

How much processing power is really necessary? I can run any 7B model pretty fast with my 1660 ti

From the videos of Skyrim AI mods I’ve seen, I don’t think it’s that far off. At least for your basic, run-of-the-mill NPCs. They’re already able to know if you take off all your clothes and will ask you stuff like “hey we don’t allow that in here” or “you must be cold”.

We can’t be that far off from a truly immersive RPG game

Don't vanilla skyrim NPCs detect when you've taken your clothes off? I remember Morrowind NPCs shunning you if you were diseased.

I think TES NPCs have been reacting to clothing since Daggerfall. Back then it was just a disposition modifier based on the total value of what you were wearing, but still.

I'm sure a company will start offering ai models for this kind of thing.

I'm less experienced with LLM, but with stable diffusion you can have a main model, and then have smaller detail specific models added in to shape the results. So I would imagine a company will start offering a service where they have base language models with certain amounts of general knowledge/styles of speech, and can mix in smaller models trained on the lore of the world, character's individual history, and things like that.

Oh dear, I guess game companies will just have to keep paying people instead of finding yet another way to min/max their greed stat.