Unofficial mod lets classic Nintendo GameCube title use AI chatbots with amusing results.
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Animal Crossing mod uses AI to orchestrate anti-Tom Nook villager revolt
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This is actually a fairly common practice if you're ever doing things in the randomizer communities for console games. To make the randomizer you have to know memory addresses in the program data; to make a tracker or multiworld randomizer you have to know the memory addresses in RAM.
Tools exist to help you with these, usually built into the emulators themselves.
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Zim the Vixen
Ars Centurion
we find the process to make the mod very interesting! but the result is ultimately lifeless and boring.
unno. maybe if the dialogue sounded more like that of the game and got the tone right. with more insight into what is happening in the game, and you removed the internet access. maybe it's something we would try? but as at is, it just completely breaks the fiction
unno. maybe if the dialogue sounded more like that of the game and got the tone right. with more insight into what is happening in the game, and you removed the internet access. maybe it's something we would try? but as at is, it just completely breaks the fiction
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It's an impressive accomplishment, sometimes my mind is just boggled by the time someone will put in to achieve the most niche things. Everyone needs a hobby though I guess, I just can't imagine spending hour after hour tracking down memory locations of text in a game and hardware 20+ years old to insert AI.
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It's a great learning exercise for reverse engineering/hacking. As to why older hardware is often used, the RAM is often much smaller, and linear instead of having Address space layout randomization.
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The overall result is cool and interesting.
It does show something interesting about the "new" push to "teach code" instead of teaching algorithms.
His "discovery of IPC" represents the problem with "teaching kids to Code" or "Code Academy". Sure, everyone can learn to code, but if you don't understand IPC, Mutex, Spinlock, nested-loops, and many other concepts you'll never "code" anything useful.
It's like shop class for dummies. Anyone can learn to use a saw, a hammer, and a drill. None of them can then "make a table". But if they were taught about stretchers, runners, wood expanding against the grain breadboard end, 8-connectors, tapering (legs), etc... then finding the right tools is a choice (C, C++, Rust, Python, etc.)
It does show something interesting about the "new" push to "teach code" instead of teaching algorithms.
His "discovery of IPC" represents the problem with "teaching kids to Code" or "Code Academy". Sure, everyone can learn to code, but if you don't understand IPC, Mutex, Spinlock, nested-loops, and many other concepts you'll never "code" anything useful.
It's like shop class for dummies. Anyone can learn to use a saw, a hammer, and a drill. None of them can then "make a table". But if they were taught about stretchers, runners, wood expanding against the grain breadboard end, 8-connectors, tapering (legs), etc... then finding the right tools is a choice (C, C++, Rust, Python, etc.)
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Wikipedia says tanuki in the Japanese version, racoon everywhere else.
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Tom Nook gets a bad rap. He offers zero interest loans on a very flexible payment schedule. It's frankly amazing he stays in business.
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If this could be improved to control the character behaviors, it could make games more alive in the post game. Things like Rune Factory could really use this for post game longevity.
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Localization. This isn't really that hard to figure out.
Also his name is Tom Nook, a localization of his Japanese name "Tanukichi".
Similarly, "raccoon mario" was the translation for Mario in SMB3 with the brown tail and ears. Again, because this made more sense to a country that had (generally) never heard of a tanuki. Remember how you become raccoon mario? You get a leaf. In Japanese folklore, the tanuki gets its shapeshifting powers by using a leaf.
And then there's the tanooki suit in SMB3, which is the upgraded raccoon mario.
It's tanukis all the way down.
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So what you're telling me is that a tanuki/tanooki is an upgraded raccoon. I understand now.
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Reminds me of a guy on ytb, Captain Southbird, who did something similar with Tomodachi Life and AC: New Leaf. Except that was a model trained on various subreddits about relationships. Funny stuff.
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I mean his name is even a play on it. I thought this was common knowledge.
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This actually makes excellent business sense in a deflationary economy.
We’re all used to living in an inflationary economy, where ten years ago a loaf of bread cost $1 but now costs $2. Inter alia, this is why paying off a mortgage early is often a bad idea. It’s the cheapest large loan you will ever have, and because of inflation, the value of $100k in 10 years time will be rather less than it is today.
However, sometimes economies are deflationary, especially when resources are dwindling. ie if a thing will be more precious in the future than now, then it makes sense to issue cheap loans now in that thing and wait as long as possible before calling them in.
For example, the price of wood has soared in recent years. If 10 years ago I loaned someone 100m3 of wood, and I ask to be repaid now, I would be quite wealthy, having made a significant profit.
The same applies to bitcoin. Unmined bitcoin is a dwindling resource. Many years ago people would pay several bitcoin for a pizza. Today one bitcoin is worth several dozen thousand dollars.
I’ve never played Animal Crossing, but it seems Tom Nook is a canny business-raccoon-tanuki. He has identified resources are dwindling and is freely giving out cheap or zero-interest loans of the essential necessaries of life, in the belief that the longer repayment is deferred, the more profit he will make.
If Animal Crossing is like other games I have played then the aim is for the player to change the economic basis of the community by creating ever growing resources, making Tom Nook’s loans trivially cheap to repay.
Thank you for reading my TEDx talk on overtly simplistic macro-economics.
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For what it’s worth, I see this as more of a proof of concept release, rather than a final product. Here’s a rough roadmap to get it somewhere more fun to play:
0. (You are here.) Find some way to get LLM dialogue into the game, see if it even works. Proof of concept work.
1. Give the LLM more information about the current game state. This probably means reading in more RAM data, checking the date to see if any holidays are coming up, see if the player’s in the lead for a fishing/bug catching contest, what did the player write in their letters, etc. Right now, this work is more proof of concept work, rather than rigorous implementation, but we’ll keep working on it.
2. Switch from an online AI model to a locally hosted one. Remove internet access as a requirement. Make sure there aren’t any issues, that you have enough horsepower to run the model quickly, etc.
3. Train a LLM on Animal Crossing dialogue, text, data, etc. Basically, you want it to mainly use the context of the game’s world when generating dialogue. (No more random comments about Trump and Zelenskyy.) Test it, see what goes wrong, what goes right.
4. Basically, take step 1 and fully implement it now. The AI model is set, it’s all offline, hopefully you’re not dealing with changing these up much more. This really will be quite a bit of work, just because there are a lot of things you’ll want to check in RAM and a lot of finicky bits to keep track of. (Really, instead of step 4, this is a step you’d want to do bits and pieces of throughout the process, with a big, final push at the end. It’s more interesting that way.)
I suspect those last two steps would be the key ones to making the in-game world feel both alive and true to the Animal Crossing world. It will just take some work to get there.
We’ll just have to be patient in the meantime.
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Think this might be an issue on the GameCube. Between the GameCube discs having 1.5GB of storage, 43MB of total RAM, and a mighty 0.0094 TFLOPS of compute, I don't see you getting a worthwhile experience. It's a very cute project, and maybe you could use this process for a modern title on near-future hardware, but I just don't see the point.
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I don't think I want this.
Sure, its a nice exercise in hacking and making a PoC, from that perspective I respect this project a lot!
But from a game and art perspective this sucks so much. AC and similar games have so much charm precisely because they have character, and not because a LLMs shat out some "probable NPC dialogue".
Going further, even item descriptions in an RPG have character. If not there is no reason to have them in the first place. If you just generate some random AIified variation of a prompt, why not remove the middle man completely and just show me the input variables instead of playing charades to fake something that looks meaningful but is essentially e-waste masquerading as character interaction?
Sure, its a nice exercise in hacking and making a PoC, from that perspective I respect this project a lot!
But from a game and art perspective this sucks so much. AC and similar games have so much charm precisely because they have character, and not because a LLMs shat out some "probable NPC dialogue".
Going further, even item descriptions in an RPG have character. If not there is no reason to have them in the first place. If you just generate some random AIified variation of a prompt, why not remove the middle man completely and just show me the input variables instead of playing charades to fake something that looks meaningful but is essentially e-waste masquerading as character interaction?
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Economically you are correct, but you're paying him off with the profits of selling his kids bugs and sticks, so...
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While I agree in some respects, I think that this is the kind of thing that is absolutely invaluable for enhancing versimilitude. This is the type of stuff that makes a world feel like a world and what makes games series like Elder Scrolls so much more enthralling than something without that same depth. This helps you dig those depths.
Unique artifacts of enhanced description will of course be the type of custom, lore-infused, human authored content of always. But imagine! What if when you bought a spear, each blacksmith offered a unique one? Maybe they all end up doing around 3-4 damage, but each one has its own visual flair, and these ones have a hammer so they also do some crushing damage, the ones with hooks can enhance your parry, and I've heard tale of a Dwarven smith down south, past the river split, who can forge an unbreakable tip from meteor ore, if you happen to ever come across such wonders...but if you need to program all of this, then create custom artwork, and then write the descriptions, we're talking...well, GTA6 and Elder Scrolls 6 type budgets, best described as bloated beasts, these bemoaned budgetary behemoths, bright before but brought low, now bearing a brand bought by boardrooms bellicosely bellowing for "Billions!"
Something like this, coming from an enthusiastic amateur community, is something I think we should encourage and congratulate. Thanks for this, and keep up the hacking!
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Oh, I have no idea how you’d ever pull it off on the GameCube alone. How much of that’s already used up by simply running Animal Crossing?
I was thinking this would all still be running on Dolphin. I’d be surprised and very impressed if someone pulled this all of locally on a single GameCube. (It’d be a cool project though.)
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How very interesting, I've long wondered about the potentiality of future AI generated chat for these NPCs. The NPC dialogue is sort of the first thing I lose interest in on Animal Crossing, to the point I find myself avoiding much chatter in the current release to try to keep it fresh.
I wish we've been able to accomplish modifying the games of the N64, Gamecube and DS as much as we could modify the Gameboy Color's Pokemon games.
I wish we've been able to accomplish modifying the games of the N64, Gamecube and DS as much as we could modify the Gameboy Color's Pokemon games.
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