Game Pictures & Videos Thread

[Moonface]

Ooh, nice art! How long have you been drawing for @Arcyriea?

[Moonface]

Anyone seen this utter travesty of an AI-generated demo of a game that this delusional person thinks is the future of gaming?
PC Gamer wrote a very entertaining article summarizing the events of the video that reminds me of the writing style of Alex Navarro (a notable example being his review for a Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing).

I'm sure there are ways AI can be used to enhance games in a way that only it can do, but this certainly isn't it.

[Dragon Lord]

Yeah, making an entire game using only AI is only going to lead to absolute slop. Using AI to help fix issues with a game, and to do some more mundane things I think can be okay. I know some game devs that have used AI just to help with some more of the mundane side of coding (of course they double check it to make sure there's nothing wrong on it), and I feel that's okay. I know the coding aspect of making games can be a very huge time waster, so I feel like it's acceptable for them to use AI to help speed that up as long as it gets checked over. Using AI for things like music and art though, no. Pay the artists and music producers. There's unfortunately a lot of anime gacha games now days that use AI for the character art, which is just wrong because one of the biggest draws of those gacha games is the character art. Some games like Azur Lane only survive because of the character art, and if they turned to AI instead of paying all of the artists they hire to design the characters, they'd be crucified by their community. Arknights is another gacha game that has absolutely amazing character art, and like Azur Lane, they actually go out and hire artists to make the characters, and if they got rid of that aspect by turning to AI to churn out slop designs for the characters, Hypergryph would also be crucified by their community.

I think I'm okay with devs using AI to help generate the world of a game as well, as long as they double check everything to make sure the AI doesn't fuck it up. Huge open world 3D games can be helped a lot by having AI help with that, I think, but the devs have to be willing to actually look and make sure there's no serious artifacting going on with the game's world before they release it. As people say, use AI as a tool to assist you, but don't rely on it to do all of the work for you, because then you end up with... well, what you posted.

tl;dr version: AI when used to assist good, AI when used to rely on for everything bad. Also AI art and music bad.

[Moonface]

Yeah, AI being used for mundane stuff like maybe creating environmental assets like trees, foliage, rocks, etc. where it just generates a load of them for a person to then pick from is another example of good use of the tech. It saves someone else having to spend time making those things and it wouldn't even take that person's job either because most of the time that same person is going to work on something else too, so they just get to spend more time on more important things in the game. I recall that Naughty Dog shared that for Uncharted 2, rather than designing multiple enemies they instead made their enemies out of pieces split into head, body, and legs. The game then picks one of those pieces at random for the enemy type being spawned which gave the enemies a lot more visual variety without more workload. Put another way, you can either make 5 heads, 5 bodies, and 5 legs and have them swapped about to get 100+ varieties, or you have to design like 100+ full models. I'm sure plenty of other games do this same thing, and I would bet there are a lot of processes in game development that don't have such easy time saving methods yet that could be resolved with AI.

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Also, yesterday the UK parliament was debating the Stop Killing Games campaign, and at one point they just straight up mentioned BarbarousKing and his GrandPooWorld series by name which was then heard by Barb himself in this incredible clip.
I pray that the guy who says it is actually a viewer of the channel and makes themselves known at some point because that would be the perfect follow-up to this.

[Mr EliteL]

Huh I'm really out of the loop, that campaign actually gets talked about in Parliament? Anyway, pretty crazy a call out for a rather well known streamer, then his appropriately named series also is included in front of many people like that.

[Moonface]

Huh I'm really out of the loop, that campaign actually gets talked about in Parliament? Anyway, pretty crazy a call out for a rather well known streamer, then his appropriately named series also is included in front of many people like that.

I don't know if this was the first time it's come up or not, but I've heard of that campaign for a while as it was asking for signatures from anyone who lives in the EU so that it would get reviewed by government. I think it was intended to be reviewed by the EU as a whole but in this case someone opted to bring it up for application within the UK specifically.

I hope that the campaign does actually achieve something, because it was made off the back of games such as The Crew where despite having a single player mode, its always-online requirement meant when Ubisoft closed down the servers for the game it made the entire thing unplayable, and worse still Ubisoft shut down any fan attempts to make the game playable. For anything that is exclusively multiplayer I don't know what the approach would be (no one can expect a developer or publisher to keep an online game up for eternity) but no game should become unplayable just because it needs a server connection for non-multiplayer components. Hitman 2016 is another example, where while you can play it without an internet connection, you can't unlock anything or if you can your progress won't be saved because progress is tied to the game servers. I don't know if it got changed by the time of Hitman 3 but if not, that's another case where it isn't justifiable.