Comment by aleph_minus_one
3 months ago
> Honestly I'm really excited about this. I've always dreamed of full blown sandbox games with extremely advanced NPCs (which the current LLMs can already kinda emulate), but on the bigger scale.
I don't believe that you want this. Even really good players don't have a chance against super-advanced NPCs (think how chess grandmasters have barely any chance against modern chess programs running on a fast computer). You will rather get crushed.
What you likely want is NPC that "behave more human-like (or animal-like)" - whatever this means.
Oh, I should've clarified - I don't want to fight against them, I just want to watch and sometimes interfere to see how the agents react ;) A god game like WorldBox/Galimulator, if you will. Or observer mode in tons of games like almost all Paradox ones.
I'm working on something similar, https://www.generativestorytelling.ai/tinyllmtown/index.html a small town where all NPCs are simulated using a small LLM. They react to everything the hero does, which means no more killing a dragon and having no one even mention it.
Once I release it, I'll have it simulate 4 hours every 2 hours or so of real time, and visitors can vote on what quest the hero undertakes next.
The simulation is simpler, I am aiming to keep everything to a size that can run on a local GPU with a small model.
Right now you can just watch the NPCs try to figure out love triangles, hide their drinking problems, complain about carrots, and celebrate when the hero saves the town yet again.
This description reminded me of Dwarf Fortress. You might look into how the AI in it works to see if it gives you any ideas about how emergent behaviors can interact?
What I want is for someone to remake this, but with modern AI and a vast interactive environment typical of a modern open world game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majesty:_The_Fantasy_Kingdom_S...
> I just want to watch and sometimes interfere to see how the agents react ;)
Even there, I am not sure whether if the AI bcomes too advanced, it will be of interest for many players (you might of course nevertheless be interested):
Here, the relevant comparison is to watching (the past) games of AlphaGo against Go grandmasters, where even the highly qualified commentators had insane difficulties explaining AlphaGo's moves because many of the moves were so different from the strategy of any Go game before. The commentors could just accept and grasp that these highly advanced moves did crush the Go grandmaster opponents.
In my opinion, the "typical" sandbox game player wants to watch something that he still can "somewhat" grasp.
>Even really good players don't have a chance against super-advanced NPCs
I guess you can make them dumber by randomly switching to hardcoded behavioral trees (without modern AI) once in a while so that they made mistakes (while feeling pretty intelligent overall), and the player would then have a chance to outsmart them.