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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

#51

Post by LeoPanthera »

b3lvedere wrote: post #47
brookman64k wrote: post #46

> The game runs on a Nintendo GameCube, a 24-year-old console with a 485 MHz PowerPC processor, 24MB of RAM, and absolutely no internet connectivity. In fact, Nintendo did release an official add-on called the Broadband Adapter, which plugged into the bottom expansion port and provided an Ethernet jack. Only a handful of games supported it, one was Phantasy Star Online. I also used it to stream games/roms from a PC.…

This is mentioned in the article: "What About the GameCube Broadband Adapter? Yes, the GameCube had an official Broadband Adapter (BBA). But Animal Crossing shipped without networking primitives, sockets, or any game-layer protocol to use it. Using the BBA here would have required building a tiny networking stack and patching the game to call it. That means: hooking engine callsites, scheduling async I/O, and handlin…

I wonder if you can bitbang an ethernet interface to abuse it into being a serial port.

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

#52

Post by Podrod »

bigyabai wrote: post #36
Gigachad wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not. But silent deranking of censored terms has everyone paranoid that anything even slightly controversial will get hidden.

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.

[dead]

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

#53

Post by dahcryn »

smt88 wrote: post #49
wincy wrote: post #5

That's hilarious that you give the villagers thought and the first thing they want to do is overthrow Tom Nook. If this works in Gamecube on an emulator, surely it'd be possible to make it work on the Switch emulators as well?

LLMs are heavily trained on reddit, and "Tom Nook is a capitalist dictator if you think about it" is a reddit meme. Like many LLM reactions, it's less "thought" and more "regurgitating reddit jokes/opinions".

It would be great if this evolved slowly during the progression of the game lol

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

#54

Post by brookman64k »

b3lvedere wrote: post #47
brookman64k wrote: post #46

> The game runs on a Nintendo GameCube, a 24-year-old console with a 485 MHz PowerPC processor, 24MB of RAM, and absolutely no internet connectivity. In fact, Nintendo did release an official add-on called the Broadband Adapter, which plugged into the bottom expansion port and provided an Ethernet jack. Only a handful of games supported it, one was Phantasy Star Online. I also used it to stream games/roms from a PC.…

This is mentioned in the article: "What About the GameCube Broadband Adapter? Yes, the GameCube had an official Broadband Adapter (BBA). But Animal Crossing shipped without networking primitives, sockets, or any game-layer protocol to use it. Using the BBA here would have required building a tiny networking stack and patching the game to call it. That means: hooking engine callsites, scheduling async I/O, and handlin…

I didn't finish reading the article before commenting. Mea culpa! Maybe it would be possible to use Phantasy Star Online's network stack via the streaming exploit. But that would leave the hooking part.

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

#55

Post by beckthompson »

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'm unsure how useful they'll really be honestly! In many situations its very useful to know when your "done" talking with an NPC when they start repeating lines etc...

There could probably be cool uses but I don't think it will be a pure "upgrade" as the repeating dialog is kind of a feature honestly.

We'll have to see how it pans out xD

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

#56

Post by heckelson »

beckthompson wrote: post #55
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'm unsure how useful they'll really be honestly! In many situations its very useful to know when your "done" talking with an NPC when they start repeating lines etc... There could probably be cool uses but I don't think it will be a pure "upgrade" as the repeating dialog is kind of a feature honestly. We'll have to see how it pans out xD

I guess you could just introduce a Symbol that marks the NPC as "I said everything I have" or gray out their text, or some other visual marker

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

#57

Post by Arisaka1 »

malfist wrote: post #19
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 used to care about repeat scripted dialogue like you, until I took an arrow to the knee

Yep. I can see how relying on non-repetitive dialogue generated by LLM's will inevitably make us lose common ground scenarios that end up being memorable moments, like the arrow to the knee from Skyrim or "such devastation! this was not my intention" from Final Fantasy 14. A way to bypass this problem is to keep the important dialogue fixed, but this only one of the problems.

Another issue would be emphasizing the meaninglessness of the dialogue. For example, playing Trails in the Sky has lots of NPC dialogue that's repetitive, but at least the dialogue is relevant with how the NPC's life progresses in the grander scheme of things, such as having difficulty with her entrance exams, or having an argument with his fiancé. It's not main dialogue but adds flavor for anyone who cares about the world enough to interact with the citizens.

I don't think I'd like to interact with characters that I know whatever it is they have to say is generated on the fly and adds nothing other than random tidbits. The novelty would quickly wear off.

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

#58

Post by zero_shift »

eric-burel wrote: post #41
shomp wrote: post #29

This is amazing. Well done figuring out the shared memory hack. That's a huge time saver and really makes sense from an engineering perspective. Ten dollars for the hammer and five thousand for knowing where to strike the machine, to paraphrase a trope on expertise applied correctly.

Technical question: what guarantees that the memory address is stable? It means that allocations always happen in the same order in the game ?

Console games of that era don't usually malloc; they have globals. Entities go into pools / buffers that are allocated ahead of time

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

#59

Post by hoskdoug »

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.

Imagine finally hearing further dialogue from the Bucket Mouse after all these years.

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

#60

Post by KeplerBoy »

rgovostes wrote: post #42

Many years ago there was a project in which researchers swapped localization strings to turn The Sims and Grim Fandango into language practice experiences. Generative dialog that is contextual and skill-appropriate dialog could also be a killer application for language practice.

Duolingo has already gone all in on AI.
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