Comment by bob1029
4 hours ago
> And potentially as a byproduct of enabling all of this, you can now slop your way to a one-shot 3D game over the weekend which looks impressive.
I think we've finally reached a weird point where AI has effectively reduced the amount of competition that real game developers have to endure.
Nothing unravels faster than a game project being built with AI. You can achieve impressive results in a day, but you can't get much further than that without actual talent. LLMs will never be able to best a human environment artist at scene composition, especially if that composition needs to be directed with nuance over time.
There's a huge difference between a game that looks impressive and one that feels impressive. You can only achieve games that feel like counter strike, call of duty and overwatch with thousands of hours of human sacrifice. The AI is almost pointless once you get to play testing and balancing. Knowing how much to adjust magical integers isn't a conversation a chat bot can resolve with endless pontification tokens.
> LLMs will never be able
That is a very bold claim, unless you meant "current LLMs".
These models aren't really LLMs -- they don't just operate on text tokens. They often include vision models and in some cases audio models. That means that they can better associate the meaning of images and words together so that when someone says "make this button blue" or "create a 3D model of a rocket" they have some level of understanding of what that is and what needs to be done.
The key question is how good that understanding is. For example, a model would likely have a good understanding of various named colours and hex values (e.g. from the HTML specs, X11 specs, and various colour comparison websites) such that it could reasonably correlate that to a CSS entry. It's not clear if/how well a model would identify that given an image, though it should be easy to generate a dataset of image to colour name and/or hex code for training and evaluation.
What's more interesting is whether these frontier models are at their core transformer models, whether they use residual streams to facilitate learning, and whether they are using some other as yet unpublished architecture that gives them an edge.
The coordinate system in game scenes is known as "world space", but that rarely means our world.
How do you train an LLM to create a world that only exists in an artist's head?
I think spending a day with just the lighting systems alone would alleviate us of any misunderstandings here. Getting lighting to work right isn't something you can solve by duct taping a vision model to the contraption.
>> And potentially as a byproduct of enabling all of this, you can now slop your way to a one-shot 3D game over the weekend which looks impressive.
Do these games really look impressive? Everything I've seen has looked like someone completely new to Unity/Unreal has slapped together a bunch of premade scripts and very poor 3d assets.
Discoverability has been the main challenge for smaller game dev companies for a while now and a flood of slop will only make it worse
Yep. Every single post I've seen about "game development is over" is yet another procedurally generated game. Not only it doesn't prove anything about Astra being "better" at making games (do people have any idea the sheer amount of open source games that do exactly that? You can find thousands of the same planet exploration games through repos, blog posts,etc. Game design schools have it as an exercise, that's how basic it is), but as you said: the wow factor of space exploration is cool, sure. It makes for a catastrophically boring game.
Leaves me to wonder whether the OpenAI glazers just never played games in their lives, or are just really superficial tech bros. Most likely, both.
Funny, it's not that different in the web-space.
Most of AI is being used to generate procedural content. It is impressive on the first video or first image, and it might look useful on the surface, but it gets grating quite fast.
There could be a large overlap between OpenAI glazers and Star Citizen dreamers.
S̶q̶u̶a̶d̶r̶o̶n̶ ̶4̶2̶ AGI is coming next year, promised !