I replaced Animal Crossing's dialogue with a live LLM by hacking GameCube memory

https://joshfonseca.com/blogs/animal-crossing-llm

by vuciv • 11 months ago

869 176 11 months ago

https://github.com/vuciv/animal-crossing-llm-mod

sardonyx001• 11 months ago

This is so cool. It opens up a whole new dimension to messing with old video games where AI can change things like how characters move, loot box contents etc.

Master_Odin• 11 months ago

In terms of changing loot box contents, that has been going on for at least the past like 7+ years through "randomizers", though I think mostly used by speed runners.

maxwelljoslyn• 11 months ago

This rules!

amilios2• 11 months ago

There's something about taking old games and injecting new life into them that just seems so fun and exciting! Also very interesting to know that the Animal Crossing codebase has been decompiled into readable C code. Fascinating! So many opportunities to mess with it.

mclau157• 11 months ago

The Ocarina of Time modding scene is growing a lot right now as well if anyone is interested

squigz• 10 months ago

I recently started playing Wind Waker (HD) Randomizer - so fun! It's almost like playing the game for the first time again.

wincy• 11 months ago

That's hilarious that you give the villagers thought and the first thing they want to do is overthrow Tom Nook. If this works in Gamecube on an emulator, surely it'd be possible to make it work on the Switch emulators as well?

amilios2• 11 months ago

Would require decompilation of the Animal Crossing game code for the Switch. I believe DRM has gotten a lot better since the Gamecube days as well. Hypothetically possible maybe but good luck haha

vuciv3• 11 months ago

I actually think now that I've gone through the process, memory scanning and writing will be enough... Except, they probably have different control codes that I'd need to reverse engineer.

looperhacks• 11 months ago

Switch DRM, running custom code and interacting with RAM is a solved problem on the Switch (1). There are some really impressive mods, like a multiplayer implementation for Super Mario Odyssey

lawlessone• 11 months ago

I am curious. Does the kind of DRM used to prevent decompilation come with any performance costs?

vuciv3• 11 months ago

yes, i'd like to try out Animal Crossing New Horizons next! :)

smt883• 11 months ago

LLMs are heavily trained on reddit, and "Tom Nook is a capitalist dictator if you think about it" is a reddit meme. Like many LLM reactions, it's less "thought" and more "regurgitating reddit jokes/opinions".

dahcryn• 11 months ago

It would be great if this evolved slowly during the progression of the game lol

ameliaquining• 11 months ago

Actually, it turns out that this particular plot arc was hardcoded by the developer and does not spontaneously arise from the LLM. https://github.com/vuciv/animal-crossing-llm-mod/blob/cc9b6b...

stavros3• 11 months ago

How can you tell? Either you're saying that LLMs have no "thoughts", and just regurgitate everything, which doesn't explain how they can reason in novel problems, or you're saying you can tell what's original thought and what's regurgitation, in which case I'll ask "how do we know your comment isn't you regurgitating an HN opinion"?

ricardobeat• 11 months ago

Like many [human] reactions, it's less "thought" and more "regurgitating reddit jokes/opinions"

RajT882• 11 months ago

I also want to overthrow Tom Nook.

He traps you (and one presumes) all of the rest of the villagers in a vicious cycle of debt, and can only be satiated by millions of bells.

all2• 11 months ago

This sounds vaguely, achingly familiar. I can't put my finger on it, but I think I've had this experience.

johnzim• 11 months ago

To be fair to Tom Nook, the interest rate on those loans is 0% and there's no risk of being foreclosed upon!

ericzawo• 11 months ago

Can you blame them when he has an iron grip on the whole town like a mafia crime lord but somehow even more evil.

hrdwdmrbl• 11 months ago

It always felt both "a cheap shot" and "valid" to express dismay that characters in video games don't react when you do things like jump up and down on their table.

While it's impossible for game developers to write code to cover every situation, AI could make general reactions possible.

It's surprising that really simple things like this haven't been tried yet (AFAIK!). Like, even if it's just the dialogue, it can still go a long way.

lmm• 11 months ago

Many games have tried for more "realistic" simulated NPCs, but usually it turns out they don't make the game any more fun, quite the opposite.

ehnto2• 11 months ago

The cost benefit is really poor, but I also wonder if it's just never been done well.

Old text adventures honestly did this heaps better than modern games do, but the reality is there was a more finite action space for them and it wasn't surprising when something wasn't catered for.

theshackleford• 11 months ago

Which games are these? I’d be interested in checking them out.

I’m only aware of experimentation in making more “difficult” NPC AI which was found less enjoyable for obvious reasons, so would be interested to see why similar but different attempts down another path also failed.

anon7000• 11 months ago

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is one of the closer attempts, NPCs will react to lots of things about you and behavior, like if you smell bad or stare at them for too long

dclowd9901• 11 months ago

I was so surprised in BotW and TotK to see NPCs duck, huddle, gasp and otherwise react to odd shit you might be doing. Also in dialogue, do contextual things like talk about the weather and time.

I would love to see a Zelda game implement LLM dialogue for random inconsequential dialogue or relating dialogue to the game context.

adammenges• 11 months ago

Great work!! Very clever.

nurettin• 11 months ago

Apart from the memory hacking, I also appreciate how he fully typed his python code. (as in foo: Optional[Dict[str, int]])

vunderba• 11 months ago

Nice job! Seems like a good use-case for the random Mii avatars milling about in the Mii Plaza on the original Nintendo Wii.

rybosome• 11 months ago

The idea of giving every character this sort of agency and seeing what opinion builds up about the world is incredibly fascinating.

Depending on how well we assume an LLM would do at this task, it’s an interesting way to see what “real people” would think about a very hypothetical situation.

dolebirchwood• 11 months ago

This is awesome. LLM-powered NPCs is one thing I'm most excited about in the future of gaming. Characters repeating the same scripted dialog over and over again is one of the biggest immersion breakers.

malfist2• 11 months ago

I used to care about repeat scripted dialogue like you, until I took an arrow to the knee

Arisaka1• 11 months ago

Yep. I can see how relying on non-repetitive dialogue generated by LLM's will inevitably make us lose common ground scenarios that end up being memorable moments, like the arrow to the knee from Skyrim or "such devastation! this was not my intention" from Final Fantasy 14. A way to bypass this problem is to keep the important dialogue fixed, but this only one of the problems.

Another issue would be emphasizing the meaninglessness of the dialogue. For example, playing Trails in the Sky has lots of NPC dialogue that's repetitive, but at least the dialogue is relevant with how the NPC's life progresses in the grander scheme of things, such as having difficulty with her entrance exams, or having an argument with his fiancé. It's not main dialogue but adds flavor for anyone who cares about the world enough to interact with the citizens.

I don't think I'd like to interact with characters that I know whatever it is they have to say is generated on the fly and adds nothing other than random tidbits. The novelty would quickly wear off.

ehnto2• 11 months ago

I would say local LLMs are already good enough for this. It might be an issue that the GPU is already quite busy at the time it's needed for LLM inference, but not an insurmountable issue.

I wouldn't ever want a game to use it for the core story writing, because it's pretty important that it is consistent and unable to be derailed. But for less serious NPC interactions or like an RPG scenario it is such a great fit.

I also wouldn't want a single player game to rely on remote inference, because that will get turned off eventually and then your game doesn't work.

mungoman2• 11 months ago

For story writing you generate into the framework of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45134144

azernik• 11 months ago

I think generally, games should move to using the GPU less for graphics and more for computation. Not just AI computation - those fancy GPUs are a big resource that simulation games could be taking advantage of and just... aren't.

(Yes, this is a Paradox callout. Give me less fancy particle effects in Vic3 and use the GPU for computing pop updates faster!)

(Probably the biggest barrier to this is the lack of a convenient C++/C#-level cross-manufacturer compute API. Vulkan is a bit too low-level for game devs to work with, OpenCL kind of sucks, and CUDA is NVIDIA-only.)

serp002• 11 months ago

Agreed, this AI-ran DnD campaign is an example of how good/funny it can be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpYVyJBmH0g&ab_channel=DougD...

beckthompson2• 11 months ago

I'm unsure how useful they'll really be honestly! In many situations its very useful to know when your "done" talking with an NPC when they start repeating lines etc...

There could probably be cool uses but I don't think it will be a pure "upgrade" as the repeating dialog is kind of a feature honestly.

We'll have to see how it pans out xD

heckelson2• 11 months ago

I guess you could just introduce a Symbol that marks the NPC as "I said everything I have" or gray out their text, or some other visual marker

vidarh3• 11 months ago

There are many different types of NPCs. Consider e.g. Minecraft villagers, that doesn't have a story-purpose, but do serve functions such as trading that could also be augmented by dialogue details.

But even for story-driven games, you can signal when you're "done" extracting story-related details in various ways, by e.g. prompt the NPC to include dialogue element A,B,C when it fits the conversation, keep track of which were output (you can make it output a marker to ensure it's easy to track even if the dialogue element has been worded differently), and have it get annoyed and tell you it doesn't have more to tell you or similar as the repetition adds up.

mgaunard• 11 months ago

It would require a completely different design to video games.

Current video games are designed around streamlining content. As a player, your job is to extract all content from an area before going to the next. That's why most areas are designed as linear corridors so that there is a straightforward progression, and most NPCs interactions are meant to offer something meaningful so as to not waste the player's time.

But imagine if interaction with NPCs wasn't just a content delivery mechanism, but instead could sometimes be rewarding, sometimes useless, dynamically adjusted in how you interact with the world in non-predictable ways.

The player would just waste their time in their usual approach of canvasing each new area, which would become unsustainable. There would be no reliable way of ensuring you've extracted all the content. All he/she could do is roam around more naturally, hoping the glimpses they catch are engaging and interesting enough.

Maybe a new player skill would be to be able to identify the genuine threads of exciting content, be it designed or emergent, within the noise of an AI-generated world.

Realistically though, how do you build an exciting player experience with this framework? A starting point might be to approach it as something more akin to LARP or improvisation theater, you'd give each NPC and player a role they need to fulfill. Whether players actually enjoy this is another thing entirely.

Wowfunhappy2• 11 months ago

In many situations its very useful to know when your "done" talking with an NPC when they start repeating lines etc...

But that's not how real life works at all, right? You talk to someone for as long as you want to talk to them, or until they start sending signals that they are done talking with you.

The way video game dialog works has always bothered me, it makes characters feel stilted and makes me care less about the characters and the world.

(Although it's a different game in many ways, consider by contrast how Portal 2 handles dialog, and the effect that has on immersion.)

whywhywhywhy• 11 months ago

Feeling it would work best in more of a Dwarf Fortress approach game where it's more you have a sandbox with rules that cause a simulation to have emergent gameplay.

vonneumannstan• 11 months ago

In many situations its very useful to know when your "done" talking with an NPC

Kind of like in real life...

hoskdoug• 11 months ago

Imagine finally hearing further dialogue from the Bucket Mouse after all these years.

arkh• 11 months ago

Characters repeating the same scripted dialog over and over again is one of the biggest immersion breakers.

The real immersion breaker and the holy grail of RPG is the fact NPC have no life or goal outside of what the player does. Imagine a game where NPCs have wants and goals and do things to get those done. Where you could leave it running for 10 years and things would have happened without you.

latexr4• 11 months ago

That’s a nice experiment, but it’s a life simulator and not really a game. There’s little fun in working your way through the first two dungeons and then getting out and being told “no need to go on your epic quest anymore, someone else from the last town beat God and now we’re at peace. Oh, and they got all the powerful artefacts along the way, so there’s literally nothing of interest for you to do anymore. Unless you want to help us plant our crops. That’s what you wanted when you picked Final Fantasy, right? To play a poor version of Harvest Moon instead.”

MacNCheese23• 11 months ago

There are plenty proof of concepts already done, for example in Skyrim

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNPF9VKmzxw

Mods Name is

https://art-from-the-machine.github.io/Mantella/

nerdjon• 11 months ago

I find myself somewhere in the middle. I think for the vast majority of games this would largely be a negative. Anything heavily story driven this would just cause issues and I think would largely ruin the experience.

I think sandbox games like animal crossing are the exception, if it ever becomes reliable enough to put in anything other than an M rated game.

Animal Crossing, the Sims, Cult of the Lamb, and similar games would infinitely extend the life of the game. But I am sure we can all already imagine the headlines when these "family" games start saying things that they really should not be... especially given recent issues.

For the record, not dismissing the person who did this work. But doing this commercially has its risks.

A_Duck• 11 months ago

You should check out https://www.meaningmachine.games/ then — they're building games with weird dynamics centred around this new possibility of LLM-powered NPCs

dbish• 11 months ago

I spent a lot of time on ML driven dialogue and natural language understanding for games in the pre-llm days working with some folks building Xbox, PC, and VR/AR games, and I'm excited about the potential here. The major barriers to shipping in a production game though are still the same imho:

1. (predictability) Games like to have a clear arc and tend to use at least some of their NPCs to move that forward, it is harder to do this with a model that could make a choice you don't predict. They tend to have a set of items, quests, what-have-you that you need boundaries around.

2. (testing) Games like to test like crazy before launch, at least the AAA ones, so their QA folks just don't like a model that can have infinite responses/variants. Many then drop to a skeletal crew for maintenance and improvements after launch, where with ML models you actually need to keep improving the model, finding long tail bugs as more players interact with the system, etc.

3. (cost) Games are usually very cost aware, it's far cheaper to just have a set human-written dialogue path, then to run a model, even an offline one. Cheaper in both actual dollar costs if you're talking about a high end LLM service call, and CPU/GPU/memory costs if you're talking an on-box system.

4. (internationalization/localization) AAA games need to launch fast to many languages and locales, using a model for NLP and dialogue management/natural language generation adds added testing costs for each new language, that is just a very cheap translation normally that can be outsourced.

There have been some fun experiments in this space, and I expect to see this improve and become common use in the future, but it will take time and more work on how best to integrate a model into the flow of a game. I do love it for "presence" so talking to NPCs feels more human-like.

Nick and the crew at AI Dungeon (and related) have always done some interesting work in this space, trying out games where AI can be used in interesting ways.

vuciv3• 11 months ago

I would love to work on this. I have worked on this a ton and have really strong ideas for some.

1. I think people assume you have one LLM per character, but I think if you had specialized ones for each quest, item, etc.., this would actually work quite well.

3. I actually think if you cached responses under certain conditions, costs can be saved significantly. This would require quite a robust context, though, to still feel dynamic.

YesBox• 11 months ago

IMO this isn't going to be fun for most once the novelty wears off. Games are goal oriented at the end of the day and the great games are masterfully curated multi-disciplinary experiences.

I'd argue throwing a game wrapper around an LLM is a new LLM experience, not a new game experience.

BizarroLand2• 11 months ago

I think the people that are for this development are thinking more along the line of a game designed from the ground up to include AI LLM interaction.

Once someone decides that will be a critical and fundamental part of a AAA game, the rest can be worked out despite what will be I am sure many unintended emergent behaviors.

d_burfoot• 11 months ago

LLM-powered NPCs is one thing I'm most excited about in the future of gaming

Incoming new type of health crisis: video game addiction coupled with LLM-induced psychosis. Dudes spending 12 hours a day farming gold in a MMORPG while flirting with their AI girlfriend sidekick

jerf2• 11 months ago

There's a number of little games and a major mod for Skyrim that implements this. I've spent a bit of time playing with the Skyrim mod.

There are some significant issues with it at the moment. One is that you have to train on vast swathes of text to get an LLM, and it's difficult after the fact to remove things after the fact. If you cooperate with the AI and stay "in Skyrim" with what you say to them it works out OK, but if you don't cooperate it becomes clear that Skyrim NPCs know something about Taylor Swift and Fox News, just to name two examples. LLMs in their current form basically can't solve this.

The LLMs are also prone to writing checks the game can't cash. It's neat that the NPCs started talking about a perfectly plausible dungeon adventure they went on in a location that doesn't exist, but "felt" perfectly Skyrim-esque, but there's clearly some non-optimal aspects about that too. And again, this is basically not solvable with LLMs as they are currently constituted.

Really slick experiences with this I think will require a generational change in AI technology. The Mantella mod is fun and all but it would be hard to sell that at scale right now as a gaming experience.

testdelacc1• 11 months ago

Feel like they could probably be used in text based adventures. Doki Doki Literature Club, despite the silly name, is a very unusual game that might really benefit from this.

jhatemyjob• 11 months ago

It's solvable it's just a lot of work. You need to have guardrails, i.e. multiple sanity-check passes (maybe there are other techniques, but I found this to be most effective)

One concrete example I'm sure these Skyrim mods aren't using is: enums in structured outputs [1] with a finite list of locations/characters/topics/etc that are allowed to be discussed. The AI is not allowed to respond with anything that is not in the enum. So you can give it a list of all the locations in the game in a huge array and it would be forced to pick one.

[1] https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/structured-outputs#a...

faxmeyourcode2• 11 months ago

This is something fine tuning should be able to improve. The main caveats are the same as always: dataset collection, labeling, and training/experimentation time.

tuxracer• 11 months ago

It seems like a guard model paired with RAG could help here. A guard model could filter out references to current events or anything outside the Skyrim universe, while RAG could be used to ground the NPCs dialogue in actual in game content. That way if the model tries to spin up a dungeon or location, it first checks against the game's data to confirm it actually exists before surfacing it to the player.

galacticaactual• 11 months ago

Very cool, nice work!

foota• 11 months ago

I wonder if it supports Resetti :-)

But also, why couldn't you look at the code to find the addresses used for dialogue? If it's already disassembled I would think you could just look at the addresses used by the relevant functions/set a breakpoint etc.,?

Nition• 11 months ago

I've thought for a while that the ideal old game for this kind of conversion would be Starship Titanic.

b3lvedere3• 11 months ago

That's a game name i haven't heard in ages. :)

famahar• 11 months ago

Extremely interesting use case. LLMs as a modding tool to recontexualize virtual spaces. I can see this being a tool used for artistic intervention in the same vein as plunderludic tools like Unity Hawk which allows you to run emulator save states in Unity3D. https://plunderludics.github.io/tools/unityhawk.html

aledalgrande• 11 months ago

I love this. Great skill and also hilarious!

shomp• 11 months ago

This is amazing. Well done figuring out the shared memory hack. That's a huge time saver and really makes sense from an engineering perspective. Ten dollars for the hammer and five thousand for knowing where to strike the machine, to paraphrase a trope on expertise applied correctly.

eric-burel• 11 months ago

Technical question: what guarantees that the memory address is stable? It means that allocations always happen in the same order in the game ?

mschuster91• 11 months ago

It needs to be a global variable in C. A variable in a function scope or runtime malloc'd spot? No chance of finding a stable spot.

Thankfully, a lot of old games love to use global variables because you can't run out of stack space or allocatable memory. Modern games shy away from that because even the tiniest consoles these days come with gigabytes worth of RAM, even a memory leak has to be a gigantic firehose to bring the system to a halt.

jbreckmckye• 11 months ago

Console games of that era don't usually malloc; they have globals. Entities go into pools / buffers that are allocated ahead of time

a_t48• 11 months ago

This is a fairly "common" technique for doing multiplayer randomizers. Typically on a smaller region, but you end up with some sort of scratch memory being used as a buffer for messages sent back and forth between the emulator and the network layer (or your flash cart's RAM and the network layer, in the case of FXPakPro!). It's super useful.

bryanhogan• 11 months ago

This is amazing! Would have loved to see more gameplay!

adt• 11 months ago

The kind of thing we were doing many years ago.

Here's the big one that made the rounds in Feb/2021:

OpenAI GPT-3 Powered NPCs: A Must-Watch Glimpse Of The Future (Modbox)

https://youtu.be/jH-6-ZIgmKY

b3lvedere3• 11 months ago

This is awesome! I'd love lots of screenshots with more funny dialogs. :)

rgovostes• 11 months ago

Many years ago there was a project in which researchers swapped localization strings to turn The Sims and Grim Fandango into language practice experiences. Generative dialog that is contextual and skill-appropriate dialog could also be a killer application for language practice.

KeplerBoy• 11 months ago

Duolingo has already gone all in on AI.

momojo• 11 months ago

This excites me. Everyone wants to learn a new language, no one wants to slog. But I'd pay money to play Grim Fandango, and get the chance to ask "What does Morte mean?" and have the LLM, in real-time, tutor me. And if I get bored, I can game on, business as usual.

But just give the AI a list of words I currently know, and it can slowly slip in more and more vocabulary, and maybe full sentences.

brookman64k2• 11 months ago

The game runs on a Nintendo GameCube, a 24-year-old console with a 485 MHz PowerPC processor, 24MB of RAM, and absolutely no internet connectivity.

In fact, Nintendo did release an official add-on called the Broadband Adapter, which plugged into the bottom expansion port and provided an Ethernet jack. Only a handful of games supported it, one was Phantasy Star Online. I also used it to stream games/roms from a PC. This worked by exploiting a memory vulnerability in Phantasy Star Online to load arbitrary code over the network, though with slower load times compared to running from disc.

b3lvedere3• 11 months ago

This is mentioned in the article:

"What About the GameCube Broadband Adapter?

Yes, the GameCube had an official Broadband Adapter (BBA). But Animal Crossing shipped without networking primitives, sockets, or any game-layer protocol to use it. Using the BBA here would have required building a tiny networking stack and patching the game to call it. That means: hooking engine callsites, scheduling async I/O, and handling retries/timeouts, all inside a codebase that never expected the network to exist."

LeoPanthera• 11 months ago

I wonder if you can bitbang an ethernet interface to abuse it into being a serial port.

brookman64k2• 11 months ago

I didn't finish reading the article before commenting. Mea culpa! Maybe it would be possible to use Phantasy Star Online's network stack via the streaming exploit. But that would leave the hooking part.

endymion-light• 11 months ago

I love this project.

VagabundoP• 11 months ago

I love projects like this. And I love my OG Game Cube - time to dust it off from the attic and put it pride of place.

LLMs in games is something I excited about.

The evil subtext in Animal crossing:

https://lparchive.org/Animal-Crossing/

thrance• 11 months ago

That's super cool! Really funny how quickly they turned into stereotypical country dwellers: mainly spending their times gossiping about each others or getting all worked-up on right-wing propaganda about places they'll never go to.

wodenokoto• 11 months ago

What is the in-game context that decides what dialogue is used? Or do they just choose at random from a dialogue bank?

Cyphus• 11 months ago

Outside of holidays and special events, they do indeed choose randomly from a dialogue bank. There’s actually multiple dialogue banks, one for each villager personality type.

tehmillhouse• 11 months ago

Interesting and well-executed. But why does the blog post read like it was written by fucking chatgpt?!

_joel• 11 months ago

Maybe it was, given the context of the post.

adenta• 11 months ago

Doesn’t the GameCube already have a network interface? Like something called phantasy star online used it for internet, and you can connect multiple GameCubes for 16 player Mario kart I believe.

simonw3• 11 months ago

That's mentioned half way down the article - search for "What About the GameCube Broadband Adapter?".

simonw3• 11 months ago

Here's the code: https://github.com/vuciv/animal-crossing-llm-mod

I was intrigued as to how it would intercept a conversation and then pause the game for long enough for the LLM to return a response, so I used https://gitingest.com/vuciv/animal-crossing-llm-mod to dump the 40,000 tokens into Claude Opus 4.1 and asked it: https://claude.ai/share/66c52dc8-9ebd-4db7-8159-8f694e06b381

The trick is the watch_dialogue() function which polls every 0.1 seconds and then answers with placeholder text: https://github.com/vuciv/animal-crossing-llm-mod/blob/cc9b6b...

  loading_text = ".<Pause [0A]>.<Pause [0A]>.<Pause [0A]><Press A><Clear Text>"
  write_dialogue_to_address(loading_text, addr)

So the user gets a "press A to continue" button and hopefully the LLM has finished by the time they press that button.

simonw3• 11 months ago

Wrote up a few more notes on my blog https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/10/animal-crossing-llm/

SpikedCola• 11 months ago

Those <Pause [0A]> tokens cause the came to pause for a few moments before ...

Should be "cause the game to pause" :)

kkukshtel• 11 months ago

I think it's funny how goblin mode this whole hack is. The memory scanner itself was clearly written by an LLM (using python??) and the way this person goes about hacking the game is very non-reverse engineer but instead someone equipped with very capable tools. No shade to the dude to be clear, I think it's sort of incredibly how possible this stuff is now due to LLMs and doesn't require someone to know how to use Ghidra.

AND ALSO - the Gamecube did actually have networking through a barely used peripheral (though I knew and loved it through Phantasy Star Online Episode 1&2): https://gc-forever.com/wiki/index.php?title=Broadband_Adapte...

jdboyd• 10 months ago

The author addresses the BBA and says he didn't use it because the game was built without networking sorry, so having that in would have been harder.

larodi• 11 months ago

The memory box part is the real hackers delight here. Thanks for taking the time to share this with us:)

klaussilveira• 11 months ago

Somewhat related. Quake 3 bot chat with LLMs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeyvvQOPlhM

https://github.com/jmarshall23/Quake3LLM

jmarshall23 is a beast, with tons of interesting id tech-based projects.

Razengan2• 11 months ago

This is what I and I'm sure many other gamers/gamedevs thought when LLMs/ChatGPT first came on the scene:

Dynamically-generated dialogue. Device-local models designed for games could be trained on the game's lore and given a different style for each NPC, and react to the player's random actions instead of blurting out canned responses each time.

I'm sure if the genre-starting veterans like Richard Garriott or Roberta Williams were still active in the industry they'd definitely want to use something like this. Imagine a King's Quest or Monkey Island where you could literally type or try anything and get a relevant response! instead of just "nope"

standardly2• 11 months ago

I've floated that idea around in various internet comments and am usually met with the typical AI=BAD response. It would work so well in a CRPG type game, but I think a lot of folks would review bomb a game like that just because

rkomorn3• 11 months ago

My main issue would be that, especially with dialog, I'd never trust whether it's something the game's writers would think is canon, correct, etc.

It would probably creep into my suspension of disbelief and mess with my enjoyment.

rkomorn3• 11 months ago

Live commentary in sports games is a place where I think LLMs could shine, but I have no idea if they could perform, time wise, to the point that it would sound right.

magic_hamster• 11 months ago

One thing I didn't quite understand from the writeup is how do you how much space you have in the memory "mailbox" for text. What is your maximum text length?

brianf0• 11 months ago

This brings me such joy, thanks for sharing.

tantalor• 11 months ago

Am I missing something, or does this not react to any in-game events? So the generated text could have been done offline or using some batch process.

The online generation is neat... but not necessary or important?

Replacing the polling with a lookup table would significantly improve the performance, and be much simpler.

Nursie• 11 months ago

In the video he mentions that he also feeds in a screenshot so that it could include live location clues.

iam_saurabh• 11 months ago

This feels like the future of gaming: community-driven mods where AI brings infinite new dialogue and quests. Imagine if Nintendo leaned into this instead of fighting mods.

jd3• 11 months ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AyEzA5ziE0

n1b0m• 11 months ago

Full video: https://youtu.be/7AyEzA5ziE0?si=Ve3R7gG2KjoWCmV7

AfterHIA• 11 months ago

It'd be cooler if someone hacked the game so parents could remotely/secretly play as villagers like marionettes.

aucisson_masque2• 10 months ago

To me LLM are one of the greatest advancement in gaming. I don’t understand how there isn’t already any big game that’s using it to have ‘live’ npc.

It would make single player game so much more alive, even railroaded one like red dead redemption because the npc could adapt more easily to what you just did, how you behave in game and so on.

Games are already demanding on gpu, running a very tiny local LLM and only when people interact with npc wouldn’t require so much power.

I’m sure there are issues which explain why it’s not already being used but the first one to do it will be remembered.

netruk44• 10 months ago

I wanted the same, so I hacked/bolted on an LLM to Morrowind (the open source recreation OpenMW).

The biggest problem I faced at the time (during ChatGPT 3 era) was that, without a good context, LLMs are the most vanilla roleplayers you’ve ever seen. By themselves, LLMs are just not interesting enough for a player to choose to talk to in-game.

If you want them to be “interesting” to talk to, you must provide (or generate and keep track of): a backstory, chat history, the scene, NPC inventory, the NPC’s current emotional state, the weather, literally everything needs to be given to the model before it generates messages for the player.

At which point you’ve got a big task. You need a way to automatically get the relevant data to the model for the specific conversation you’re having. There might be tools to pick appropriate text documents from a db given a conversation topic, but I didn’t/don’t know how to make that work for games.

I’m sure there’s a way to accomplish this with more modern tools and models. (Maybe instead of providing all that data up front, you would now give the model tools to call to retrieve that data on-demand?) But that’s what made me give up in 2022.

aucisson_masque2• 10 months ago

Of course it would require the game engine to provide context to the LLM, it certainly is quite a bit of work but nothing technically impossible and the result are endless possibilities and endless replayabilities. You could very well let the LLM decide if an npc should agree to give an object to the player or not, even let the player try to convince the npc.

I mean it looks like to me the next big step in gaming after 3D and yet this is being ignored.

I replaced Animal Crossing's dialogue with a live LLM by hacking GameCube memory

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