Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

turingtribe.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 96 posts

Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

#21

Post by libraryatnight »

dragonwriter wrote: post #17
lwb wrote: post #3

To 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.

Indeed, I'd be curious to see what some indie devs do with it.

Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

#22

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

caprese wrote: post #18
newobj wrote: post #12

There 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…

The market is dead because Nvidia only want their high tier graphics cards to be deployed... can you imagine if instead of deploying 30,000 dollar GPUs, you could drop quad Titan X's or Titan V's. The datacenter license is cancer!

Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

#23

Post by heavenlyblue »

caprese wrote: post #18
newobj wrote: post #12

There 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…

Are you implying Google doesn’t need to maintain an expensive cloud infrastructure for it as opposed to Playstation?

The only reason they can do that today without specialised hardware a-la OnLive is because Nvidia and co. now have specialised GPU circuits allowing one to stream the encoded video output to memory.

When OnLive started they had to do it themselves.

I don’t believe you have any idea what you are speaking about.

Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

#24

Post by ghostbrainalpha »

dragonwriter wrote: post #17
lwb wrote: post #3

To 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.

Would it help in game development? For example giving developers better looking playable prototypes while the artists are still working out their designs?

Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

#25

Post by enumjorge »

caprese wrote: post #18
newobj wrote: post #12

There 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…

Where are you getting that it’ll only require a negligible instance on existing infrastructure? Running a AAA game on 4K takes a pretty beefy machine. I doubt it’s a workload that you can throw on some small VM without making any changes to your hardware infrastructure.

Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

#26

Post by ghostbrainalpha »

j-c-hewitt wrote: post #16
shultays wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are totally right about the turn based games.

I used a game streaming service called Shadow, and it works amazing for Sim City, Frost, and Civilization type games.

I really hope Google focused on putting out quality titles in the city builder genres. Hell it might even make sense if they outright bought the Civilization franchise.

Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

#27

Post by kllrnohj »

eof wrote: post #14

Consensus 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 (sometime…

> 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).

For that usage Nvidia's thing was way more interesting: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2019/03/18/gaugan-photorealist...

That gets you usable texture assets super quickly, which is probably what your solo developer friend spends the most time on. That or models. Neither of which Stadia's style transfer helps with. They probably aren't spending much time tweaking a shader-applied post-process effect, but hey, maybe they are, and this style transfer ML thing is useful. Very, very unlikely, but maybe.

Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

#29

Post by heyitsguay »

lwb wrote: post #3

To 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.

I think the more interesting applications will come when you get tools like this used by visual artists, complementing handmade design. The demo is cool but uses style transfer very bluntly, applying one style to the whole image with high intensity. I imagine the future of this is something more like neural "shaders", able to apply real-time pixel alterations to scenes or objects within scenes. Used carefully, they could increase the range of creative choices a visual artist can make.
Post reply on HN