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Robotopia: A 3D, first-person, talking simulator

elbowgreasegames.substack.com

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Re: Robotopia: A 3D, first-person, talking simulator

#41

Post by themanmaran »

AlphaWeaver wrote: post #39
tom_0 wrote: post #6

Hey, Tommaso here, I'm one of the founders of the Robotopia studio. I didn't expect to see this here! Ask me anything :)

Do you think there's a path where you can pregenerate popular paths of dialogue to avoid LLM inference costs for every player? And possibly pair it with a lightweight local LLM to slightly adapt the responses? While still shelling out to a larger model when users go "off the rails"?

Not the founder, but having run conversational agents at decent scale, I don't think the cost actually matters much early on.

It's almost always better to pay more for the smarter model, than to potentially give a worse player experience.

If they had 1M+ players there would certainly be room to optimize, but starting out you'd certainly spend more trying engineer the model switcher than you would save in token costs.

Re: Robotopia: A 3D, first-person, talking simulator

#42

Post by tom_0 »

themanmaran wrote: post #41
AlphaWeaver wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think there's a path where you can pregenerate popular paths of dialogue to avoid LLM inference costs for every player? And possibly pair it with a lightweight local LLM to slightly adapt the responses? While still shelling out to a larger model when users go "off the rails"?

Not the founder, but having run conversational agents at decent scale, I don't think the cost actually matters much early on. It's almost always better to pay more for the smarter model, than to potentially give a worse player experience. If they had 1M+ players there would certainly be room to optimize, but starting out you'd certainly spend more trying engineer the model switcher than you would save in token costs.

I agree, trying to save on costs early on is basically betting against things getting better. Not only that but in almost every case people prefer the best model they can get!

Not only that but I think our selling point is rewarding creativity with emergent behavior. I think baked dialogue would turn into traditional game with worse writing pretty quick and then you got a problem. For example, this AI game here does multiple choices with a local model and people seem a bit mild about it.

We could use it to cache popular QA, but in my experience humans are insane and nobody ever says even remotely similar things to robots :)

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2828650/The_Oversight_Bur...

Re: Robotopia: A 3D, first-person, talking simulator

#43

Post by tom_0 »

lostmsu wrote: post #33
tom_0 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I can't believe I missed that! That makes whisper.cpp and llama.cpp valid options if the user has Nvidia, thanks.

Whisper.cpp and llama.cpp also work with Vulkan.

Yeah, I researched this and I absolutely missed this whole part. To my defense I looked into this in 2023 which is ages ago :) Looks like local models are getting much more mature.

Re: Robotopia: A 3D, first-person, talking simulator

#44

Post by tom_0 »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #34
malchow wrote: post #30

This is an incredible foretaste of what AI can enable in gaming. Not replacing humans (the creators here are former leaders from Minecraft), but rather simply unlocking more fun gameplay by offering creativity, humor, and branched storytelling customized to the player.

I strongly suspect that the advent of LLMs stalled the new elder scrolls game another 5-6 years.

Hah from my knowledge of traditional AAA, there is 0 chance any AAA in development right now uses LLMs. A lot of them don't even use it for coding and gamedevs' mood about AI is abysmal.

Re: Robotopia: A 3D, first-person, talking simulator

#46

Post by tom_0 »

woodrowbarlow wrote: post #36
tom_0 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks :) It may sound insane but we convert actions to Python functions then ask the LLM to write a python script that actually runs in IronPython inside the game. Then we have a visual Behavior Tree system to let our designer define the actions. So yeah, they got a bunch of general actions like walk, talk, follow, interact etc. PS: I think MCP/Tool Calls are a boondoggle and LLMs yearn to just run code. It's crazy…

uhhh... you're running generated code on your customers' PCs? what kind of sandboxing do you have?

Fair reaction tbh. Right now there's a time watchdog + I'm entirely disabling all I/O and import, But going forward I want to replace it with a proper sandboxing tech... things I looked into are V8 isolates, compilation to WASM, implementing our own gutted python interpreter, spinning up a locked down process, and others. I'm definitely aware of the risk here. The good news is that unless we get pwned, LLMs are very unlikely to write malicious code for the user.

Re: Robotopia: A 3D, first-person, talking simulator

#47

Post by dyauspitr »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #34
malchow wrote: post #30

This is an incredible foretaste of what AI can enable in gaming. Not replacing humans (the creators here are former leaders from Minecraft), but rather simply unlocking more fun gameplay by offering creativity, humor, and branched storytelling customized to the player.

I strongly suspect that the advent of LLMs stalled the new elder scrolls game another 5-6 years.

Why? Because they feel like it needs to be a part of the game?

Re: Robotopia: A 3D, first-person, talking simulator

#48

Post by tom_0 »

d3rockk wrote: post #37
tom_0 wrote: post #6

Hey, Tommaso here, I'm one of the founders of the Robotopia studio. I didn't expect to see this here! Ask me anything :)

This has insanely incredible potential for language learning. Do you plan to implement support for additional languages?

Yes, but every language is going to be a "port", not something contracted out like traditional localization. I haven't decided how exactly but language conversion will land somewhere between these two extremes: 1. (expensive) pick a suite of "native" models (eg. models from China), TTS, ASR. Rewrite all the prompts in the target language. Revalidate all characters by hand 2. (cheap) slap a translation model around input and output and let the game run in English internally. My gut feeling is that this could have very poor results though and increase latency.

It's definitely a research project, this has never been done before.

Re: Robotopia: A 3D, first-person, talking simulator

#50

Post by Workaccount2 »

tom_0 wrote: post #44
Workaccount2 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly suspect that the advent of LLMs stalled the new elder scrolls game another 5-6 years.

Hah from my knowledge of traditional AAA, there is 0 chance any AAA in development right now uses LLMs. A lot of them don't even use it for coding and gamedevs' mood about AI is abysmal.

Let me just remind you that Microsoft owns the elder scrolls franchise now, for better or worse.
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