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

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

#191

Post by netruk44 »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #190

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 wh…

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.

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

#192

Post by Razengan »

rkomorn wrote: post #184
standardly wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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

You mean trying some interaction that should be plausible in a point-&-click adventure game but getting told "I can't do that" because the devs didn't think of it, or typing some slightly different grammar in a text adventure game and the parser not understanding common words, or getting the same responses over and over in an AAA+ RPG once the prewritten dialog tree runs out, does NOT creep into your suspension of disbelief?

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

#193

Post by rkomorn »

Razengan wrote: post #192
rkomorn wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It would probably creep into my suspension of disbelief and mess with my enjoyment. You mean trying some interaction that should be plausible in a point-&-click adventure game but getting told "I can't do that" because the devs didn't think of it, or typing some slightly different grammar in a text adventure game and the parser not understanding common words, or getting the same responses over and over in an AAA+ R…

Honestly? No, it doesn't, but maybe suspension of disbelief isn't the right wording.

Typically, when I play games, I build up some sort of mental model of how the game's meant to function, and how the game's creators want me to experience it. eg: running into useless/limited dialog trees with an NPC tells me it's not important. Not being able to do something tells me that thing isn't relevant (although sometimes, I guess it is fun to try something fruitless for a while). It doesn't have to be perfect but it helps if it's consistent.

What I understand about programming and game design leads me to accept there are going to be limitations encountered and tradeoffs made, so they rarely bother me beyond the first time I experience it.

With a more open-ended, AI-driven experience, I think I'd just end up wondering if the interactions I'm getting make sense, if they should be taken seriously, etc. I do think games have a lot of artistry (design, assets, writing, etc) behind them, and I suspect having "live" AI-generated stuff would distract me by making me wonder if I'm actually getting the right vision.

It's all speculative, of course. Maybe I'd try it out and find it cool. It's certainly not something I think shouldn't be attempted. :)

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

#194

Post by lazide »

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.

Just like a PC, bare hardware without firmware or a boot OS is pretty useless. Same with emulators.

Most distribute a pretty wide range of stuff along with them.

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

#195

Post by 0points »

bigyabai wrote: post #168
0points wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I've seen people arrested for discussing Switch emulation in-detail.

Nope, that didn't happen.

Nobody got arrested for discussing emulation.

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

#196

Post by jdboyd »

kkukshtel wrote: post #181
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…

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 G…

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.

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

#197

Post by aucisson_masque »

netruk44 wrote: post #191
aucisson_masque wrote: post #190

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 wh…

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 gene…

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.

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

#198

Post by standardly »

rkomorn wrote: post #193
Razengan wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would probably creep into my suspension of disbelief and mess with my enjoyment. You mean trying some interaction that should be plausible in a point-&-click adventure game but getting told "I can't do that" because the devs didn't think of it, or typing some slightly different grammar in a text adventure game and the parser not understanding common words, or getting the same responses over and over in an AAA+ R…

Honestly? No, it doesn't, but maybe suspension of disbelief isn't the right wording. Typically, when I play games, I build up some sort of mental model of how the game's meant to function, and how the game's creators want me to experience it. eg: running into useless/limited dialog trees with an NPC tells me it's not important. Not being able to do something tells me that thing isn't relevant (although sometimes, I g…

I think the solution to your hang-up, which doesn't exist yet (AFAIK) is an LLM that is fine-tuned specifically for strict narrative context. The NPCs would then be trained on its own lore, and prompted accordingly. Hallucinations would for sure completely ruin the immersion, break the fourth wall, etc, so this thing would need to have some level of deterministic control. I'm hopeful for the immediate future though, seems like something that is totally doable even if it isn't 100% perfect at first.
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