Adventure game graphics with DALL-E 2 • Hacker News Board

Re: Adventure game graphics with DALL-E 2

#71

Post by hnick » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 6:37 AM UTC

skytrue wrote: post #26

I started off feeling hopeful/excited by OpenAI, GPT-3, DALL-E, etc, as a creator/writer. As time has progressed and I've used these tools and other machine learning tools to create media, I've become disillusioned. It feels as if this is about to explode an existing problem, namely, there's too much content in the world already. Lowering the effort bar for content creation and generation is, in some ways, going to c…

> I wonder if we'll see a new generation of "editors" showing up to help curate and provide some guidance in terms of what to play if you're limited on time.

Iron Pineapple has an entertaining series he calls "Steam Dumpster Diving" which is similar to this, but it's very focused on Souls-Like games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KARY5ocvKo&list=PLuY9odN8x9...

It does sometimes include games many of us have heard of but there are a lot of unknown games, and plain bad ones (he has a soft spot for student projects too). I think he sees the value of new ideas hidden in jank, as do I, so I like the series.

I think the shift will be towards matching personalities, you get to know a reviewer and see what they like and how compatible they are with your own opinions. It doesn't have to be a one-to-one match as long as you're aware how they diverge on certain genres. The curator section on Steam seems to be an attempt at this, but any social media that allows following/subscription could serve too. It's still a significant time investment to keep up to date and to even find that matching personality.

I wonder if I actually bothered leaving reviews on Steam, would it suggest people with similar tastes to me?

Re: Adventure game graphics with DALL-E 2

#72

Post by ido » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 6:38 AM UTC

crumpledbyte wrote: post #50

ido wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t want it “whatabout” this, but…Is art really the thing we need to automate right now? There’s so much labor that we more directly need more of and that we could all benefit a lot more from automating it. To give a mundane example off the top of my head- street cleaning. I live in a big city (Berlin) which is often filthy with litter. Obviously there are not enough people cleaning it (or it wouldn’t be). Can’t…

The direct application is instant illustration. It's called "art" because it has less requirements and can't be objectively judged. There is a long way to becoming useful, but it can have a very real world impact in everyday jobs. Lots of people losing their jobs over this also means more available workforce for those more important jobs of yours

I wasn’t seriously expecting investment to change, just kinda funny/sad that in this case the thing getting automated is something humans enjoy doing (illustrating) rather than many things they both don’t enjoy and need more (street cleaning, construction work, menial physical labor in general). So you think in your example illustrators taking up street cleaning work will result in an overall improvement of life for mankind?

Aren’t the machines supposed to make our lives better?

Re: Adventure game graphics with DALL-E 2

#73

Post by grumbel » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 6:44 AM UTC

I played around with that a bit myself, though mostly 2D tiled side scrollers, but I found it pretty much impossible to create good 8/16bit style graphics with DALL-E2. It can create pixel-art just fine and it can create pixel-art sprites, but it's all in the style of modern smartphone games or flash animation, not in the style of actual 80/90 games. And like most of DALL-E2 output, it's extremely zoomed in, so you never get something that looks like a screenshot, you get a closeup of a single sprite.

Even trying to infill 8/16bit games was a disaster, as it just ended up repeating the tiles 1:1, not creating actual level structure with those tiles.

DALLE-mini in contrast is pretty blurry and low-res, but it can produce images that at least look like actual video games. So I assume DALL-E2 just has a huge hole in the training data here, as nothing video game related produced good results. The article settles for prompts focusing on regular artists as well, instead of video games.

One area that DALL-E2 absolutely nails is RPG-style portrait images, it can crunch out amazing ones on the first try.

DALLE-mini:

https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/m...

DALL-E2:

https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/m...

Re: Adventure game graphics with DALL-E 2

#74

Post by hammyhavoc » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 6:45 AM UTC

TillE wrote: post #2

These sort of complex 2D environments are a nightmare to work with in adventure games, since you have to manually detail where the player character can go, how the character should grow/shrink to simulate perspective, etc. I checked a video of Milkmaid of the Milky Way (2017) and sure enough, the environments are 3D with heavy stylization. Characters are animated in 2D but positioned and rendered as billboards or sim…

They're not difficult, mate. Nav meshes and scaling. What's there to get wrong? It's one of the more simplistic things you can do in terms of game dev. Few hours of work, tops.

Re: Adventure game graphics with DALL-E 2

#75

Post by GrumpyNl » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 7:10 AM UTC

thorum wrote: post #47

tlack wrote: post #7

I've been exploring a related concept in a Telegram game. The player can basically create a choose your own adventure-type world by describing a set of interlocking scenes and the segues (buttons/commands) between them. I'm using Disco Diffusion for the rendering instead of Dall-e 2 but the limitations are similar. It can be frustrating to get consistent results or impose the kind of order on them that is required to…

One cool thing about Stable Diffusion (the current leading competitor to DALLE) is that you can create images in a similar style by configuring the seed number. Different prompts with the same seed number can be used to create different images with similar visual styles, character design, etc. For example, this person used SD to generate portraits of the same woman at different ages, from an infant to an 80 year old:…

Why does it have so many problems with the eyes?

Re: Adventure game graphics with DALL-E 2

#76

Post by rob74 » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 7:12 AM UTC

ido wrote: post #40

jillesvangurp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're at the beginning of a rapidly evolving situation where out of the blue it is now possible to direct an AI to produce imagery that is interesting using just language. From there to moving animations is a relatively small step and already being worked on. From there to photo realistic scenes directed by just words not that big of a leap either and also something that is being worked on. Are there constraints, gli…

I don’t want it “whatabout” this, but…Is art really the thing we need to automate right now? There’s so much labor that we more directly need more of and that we could all benefit a lot more from automating it. To give a mundane example off the top of my head- street cleaning. I live in a big city (Berlin) which is often filthy with litter. Obviously there are not enough people cleaning it (or it wouldn’t be). Can’t…

Or recycling - from a conveyor belt full of mixed garbage, pick out the items that are most likely to be a given type of plastic (PET, HDPE, PS, ABS etc. etc.)

Re: Adventure game graphics with DALL-E 2

#77

Post by rob74 » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 7:19 AM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #65

ido wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t want it “whatabout” this, but…Is art really the thing we need to automate right now? There’s so much labor that we more directly need more of and that we could all benefit a lot more from automating it. To give a mundane example off the top of my head- street cleaning. I live in a big city (Berlin) which is often filthy with litter. Obviously there are not enough people cleaning it (or it wouldn’t be). Can’t…

"This street but cleaner and without the graffiti and mess" would be an awesome prompt for an AI. And possibly an essential step for a cleaning bot to even understand the difference between clean and not clean. Otherwise these things are not connected in any obvious way and humanity has been known to work on many problems at the same time. The whole point about Berlin (I live there too) is that it isn't Muenich. Muen…

Munich (not "Muenich"), clean streets? Well ok, everything is relative, but even in Munich there is a lot of garbage and graffiti (although I concede that the graffiti in Berlin is better than in Munich, because in Munich most of it seems to be because of the rivalry of the two local football clubs). But, to also say something positive: Munich wouldn't be so expensive if it was as undesirable as you describe it. And yeah, Berlin is desirable too, that's why it now gets gentrified too. That's life!

Re: Adventure game graphics with DALL-E 2

#78

Post by flohofwoe » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 7:26 AM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #38

skytrue wrote: post #26

I started off feeling hopeful/excited by OpenAI, GPT-3, DALL-E, etc, as a creator/writer. As time has progressed and I've used these tools and other machine learning tools to create media, I've become disillusioned. It feels as if this is about to explode an existing problem, namely, there's too much content in the world already. Lowering the effort bar for content creation and generation is, in some ways, going to c…

We're at the beginning of a rapidly evolving situation where out of the blue it is now possible to direct an AI to produce imagery that is interesting using just language. From there to moving animations is a relatively small step and already being worked on. From there to photo realistic scenes directed by just words not that big of a leap either and also something that is being worked on. Are there constraints, gli…

I wonder how tweakable those generated images are. The most important requirement for 'game art creation' is that it is created in a tight feedback loop between an artists, an art director who needs to enforce an overall artistic vision, and the cold, hard requirements of the game design.

Can I tell the AI "that looks great, keep the trees and house, but I need the door on the right side, and the sky a bit less cloudy". Will it be able to incorporate such instructions without "remixing" a very different image? Can it "understand" the suggestions the same way a human can without having to go into so much details that it essentially becomes procedural generation? Is this even something that's possible with the current approach?

If that's not possible, then I can just as well google and hope to find a matching image.

Re: Adventure game graphics with DALL-E 2

#79

Post by CamperBob2 » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 7:30 AM UTC

yoyopa wrote: post #55

i keep thinking these kind of tools are very dangerous and can lead to a lost generation of artists, who won't develop their skills because they can't compete with the garbage output of "ai" algorithms.

Yeah, just like calculators killed off all the mathematicians, I guess.

Re: Adventure game graphics with DALL-E 2

#80

Post by shreyshnaccount » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 7:32 AM UTC

skytrue wrote: post #26

I started off feeling hopeful/excited by OpenAI, GPT-3, DALL-E, etc, as a creator/writer. As time has progressed and I've used these tools and other machine learning tools to create media, I've become disillusioned. It feels as if this is about to explode an existing problem, namely, there's too much content in the world already. Lowering the effort bar for content creation and generation is, in some ways, going to c…

there's also an interesting take that as these generative models become better they will be used for search instead of regular search engines, and social apps would automatically generate content for you, trained on the vast dataset they already have. i think the hardest thing in this trend is going to be assessing 'truthfulness' automatically