It could be that they are throwing it out so that the community try to find a practical application of it. It is obvious that they understand that what they are demoing is not the end product so to speak, but just the best way to represent general idea.
Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time
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Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time
#12There is nothing more Googley than building something that's technically impressive with absolutely no - or even antithetical - market fit
Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time
#13I'm already excited to see what Microsoft will show at E3 with Xcloud streaming service that they have been working on for a couple of years- lots of great progress in that area right now.
Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time
#14Consensus in this thread seems to be that this is a neat gimmick but nothing else.
Maybe because I have a friend working on a video game as a solo developer, and putting a /lot/ of energy/money/time into art--I really see the potential in this (type of thing).
This is not really for the player's benefit to put on whatever mods they want.
This is for fast iteration for artists and creators to automate a huge (sometimes necessary evil) burden.
Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time
#15To me this was the least interesting part of the Stadia reveal. State share was the real innovation imo. Would any serious game studio use style transfer ml to actually replace their visual artists? Didn't seem like the quality was there. That said, it is an awesome PoC. Just not something I see being practically applicable.
Honestly seems more like a user-end personalization than something a developer would use. In a game settings menu, you choose an image that maybe you uploaded to use as the game style? Definitely something people would use. Especially if they figure out how to make it selectively apply to only certain textures/objects or parts of the screen, which seems likely.
Street Fighter 4 had a feature kinda like that (with predefined selectable styles). AFAIK it was not popular. Sometimes my friends would turn it on as a joke.
Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time
#16y tho
They need to show something shiny to hide the fact that the system has 100ms of latency on a test environment. I wonder how much lag the style transfer would add
100ms+ feels worse in this kind of thing compared to 100ms ping to a multiplayer server because even if you have bad ping to a server the game still records your inputs locally and feels responsive. More realistically it will be more like 180ms+ on a home connection.
I was an OnLive user when it existed earlier in the decade and I would say that it felt generally fine in games with forgiving timers that were not all that hard. In any game that is challenging, this kind of lag even in single player games can be very frustrating, and you might as well not even think about multiplayer because it will be a much worse experience than playing on a 56K modem in the late 1990s.
The old Assassin's Creed games were a great fit for the technology because nothing required a reaction time of under 1000 ms and movement did not require a lot of fine adjustments. Anything turn based is also a great fit for this kind of technology.
Even Steam Link wireless in the same house over a good router has annoying input lag that may not be immediately noticeable until you compare it to a wired connection or using the PC itself.
Another big issue with this in the US is that only rich people are going to have the quality of connection you would need to enjoy this at good quality. And if you are rich, spending like $1k on a budget gaming PC or a few hundred bucks on a console are going to be pretty reasonable. No one would be dumb enough to spend $300/month+ on a high bandwidth connection so that they can stream games to potato hardware.
On the other hand, if high bandwidth connections were ubiquitous in the US as they are in some other developed countries at an affordable price, the calculus would be totally different.
Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time
#17To me this was the least interesting part of the Stadia reveal. State share was the real innovation imo. Would any serious game studio use style transfer ml to actually replace their visual artists? Didn't seem like the quality was there. That said, it is an awesome PoC. Just not something I see being practically applicable.
> Would any serious game studio use style transfer ml to actually replace their visual artists?
No, a serious (AAA) studio would not. OTOH, the platform might intend to support producers that aren't AAA studios, and whose limited pre-release resources are focussed on gameplay more than art assets, and those producers might view it very differently than AAA studios.
Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time
#18There is nothing more Googley than building something that's technically impressive with absolutely no - or even antithetical - market fit
Onlive - required other people's infrastructure and a hardware play, and a software client.
Playstation Now - required Sony to buy/use a cloud service, maintain it, and expensive Sony hardware just as a force of habit.
Google - negligible instance running on their existing infrastructure, maintained under existing processes, playable on chromecasts already in hotels and homes everywhere, alongside browsers and mobile devices.
If Google doesn't shut it down within the 5 years for people to notice this is even an option, they could focus more on titles and developers more than any other entrant to this market.
And perhaps the gaming is just the application to get people's attention.
Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time
#19y tho
They need to show something shiny to hide the fact that the system has 100ms of latency on a test environment. I wonder how much lag the style transfer would add
Style Transfer might be a way to paper over lag for some connections and some types of games? It might be better to have local ML-interpreted "pretty" screens than the usual rain fade/digital tears of struggling-to-keep-up-with-the-action video codec?
Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time
#20This is not a consumer product at all. I don't know how useful it will be but it's designed to be development tool for early art direction visualization.
Even for 2d visualization it could be very useful if you could drop images into your website mockup files and have it intelligently apply color palette and texture information to your existing content.
It won't look good, but it might look good enough to save you from having to manually tweak the design 20-30 times to explore a range of styles.