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

joshfonseca.com

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

#161

Post by BizarroLand »

YesBox wrote: post #129
dolebirchwood wrote: post #15

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.

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.

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.

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

#163

Post by jerf »

faxmeyourcode wrote: post #160
jerf wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Improve, yes, fix, no. I was actually already using a model fine-tuned for Skyrim.

I didn't go into it in detail, but it isn't even that I got the NPCs to start babbling about Taylor Swift. What is was was just that they knew that she was a musician, and as such, might be at the tavern. That's very hard to remove.

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

#164

Post by isk517 »

johnzim wrote: post #157
RajT88 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Tom Nook didn't need a down payment either.

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

#165

Post by SpikedCola »

simonw wrote: post #122
simonw wrote: post #90

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() fu…

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

> Those tokens cause the came to pause for a few moments before ...

Should be "cause the game to pause" :)

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

#166

Post by vuciv »

dbish wrote: post #125
dolebirchwood wrote: post #15

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.

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 ha…

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.

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

#167

Post by faxmeyourcode »

jerf wrote: post #163
faxmeyourcode wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Improve, yes, fix, no. I was actually already using a model fine-tuned for Skyrim. I didn't go into it in detail, but it isn't even that I got the NPCs to start babbling about Taylor Swift. What is was was just that they knew that she was a musician, and as such, might be at the tavern. That's very hard to remove.

ahhh yeah I see what you mean

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

#168

Post by bigyabai »

0points wrote: post #45
bigyabai wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just covering my ass. Life is good right now and I don't want to meet any Nintendo ninjas, even for insinuated infractions. It's not so much a condemnation of HN, but the way IP is in the US. The only website I want hosting my comments on Nintendo modding is my own.

That's hilarious. That modder who had to pay 2M sold drm circumvention kits for the Switch. That's a pretty clear case. You pretending that saying "emulator" on a forum qualifies just makes you a extra special snowflake.

Okay, lol. Special snowflake it is.

All I'll say is that I've seen people arrested for discussing Switch emulation in-detail. Never saw that happen with Cheat Engine.

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

#169

Post by bigyabai »

jraph wrote: post #50
bigyabai wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just covering my ass. Life is good right now and I don't want to meet any Nintendo ninjas, even for insinuated infractions. It's not so much a condemnation of HN, but the way IP is in the US. The only website I want hosting my comments on Nintendo modding is my own.

I doubt a star will make Nintendo lawyers go "ow nose, they didn't spell out emulator in full, we can't attack them! Damn those star armors!". I don't think it changes anything technically. The only thing this kind of censoring does is countering basic censor bots I think, and somehow making swear words publishable in the US.

Look; if you want to risk your chipper little lifestyle explaining the various ways to run New Horizons, be my guest. I've insinuated enough already, anyone who cares about the discussion on-grounds wouldn't have anything else to ask.

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

#170

Post by bigyabai »

HeatrayEnjoyer wrote: post #154
perching_aix wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Facebook at some point filtered links to them from private messaging. I know this from personal experience. Not sure if they still do. Also fairly common on Reddit and Discord for communities to ban discussions of them, or even falsely claim they're blanket illegal outright.

Why? An emulator isn't legally any different than a virtual machine.

Low-level emulators can be legally identical to a virtual machine, but often isn't. Most modern consoles can't be emulated that way, and most require you to dump a bootrom from your own console hardware, alongside game keys and other dubious digital paraphernalia.
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