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

Do you try trick your calculator by entering large sums that it might not have been programmed to answer?

Actually, it turns out that this particular plot arc was hardcoded by the developer and does not spontaneously arise from the LLM. https://github.com/vuciv/animal-crossing-llm-mod/blob/cc9b6b...

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

How can you tell? Either you're saying that LLMs have no "thoughts", and just regurgitate everything, which doesn't explain how they can reason in novel problems, or you're saying you can tell what's original thought and what's regurgitation, in which case I'll ask "how do we know your comment isn't you regurgitating an HN opinion"?

Switch DRM, running custom code and interacting with RAM is a solved problem on the Switch (1). There are some really impressive mods, like a multiplayer implementation for Super Mario Odyssey

I actually think now that I've gone through the process, memory scanning and writing will be enough... Except, they probably have different control codes that I'd need to reverse engineer.

It would require a completely different design to video games.

Current video games are designed around streamlining content. As a player, your job is to extract all content from an area before going to the next. That's why most areas are designed as linear corridors so that there is a straightforward progression, and most NPCs interactions are meant to offer something meaningful so as to not waste the player's time.

But imagine if interaction with NPCs wasn't just a content delivery mechanism, but instead could sometimes be rewarding, sometimes useless, dynamically adjusted in how you interact with the world in non-predictable ways.

The player would just waste their time in their usual approach of canvasing each new area, which would become unsustainable. There would be no reliable way of ensuring you've extracted all the content. All he/she could do is roam around more naturally, hoping the glimpses they catch are engaging and interesting enough.

Maybe a new player skill would be to be able to identify the genuine threads of exciting content, be it designed or emergent, within the noise of an AI-generated world.

Realistically though, how do you build an exciting player experience with this framework? A starting point might be to approach it as something more akin to LARP or improvisation theater, you'd give each NPC and player a role they need to fulfill. Whether players actually enjoy this is another thing entirely.

There are many different types of NPCs. Consider e.g. Minecraft villagers, that doesn't have a story-purpose, but do serve functions such as trading that could also be augmented by dialogue details.

But even for story-driven games, you can signal when you're "done" extracting story-related details in various ways, by e.g. prompt the NPC to include dialogue element A,B,C when it fits the conversation, keep track of which were output (you can make it output a marker to ensure it's easy to track even if the dialogue element has been worded differently), and have it get annoyed and tell you it doesn't have more to tell you or similar as the repetition adds up.

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

I think generally, games should move to using the GPU less for graphics and more for computation. Not just AI computation - those fancy GPUs are a big resource that simulation games could be taking advantage of and just... aren't.

(Yes, this is a Paradox callout. Give me less fancy particle effects in Vic3 and use the GPU for computing pop updates faster!)

(Probably the biggest barrier to this is the lack of a convenient C++/C#-level cross-manufacturer compute API. Vulkan is a bit too low-level for game devs to work with, OpenCL kind of sucks, and CUDA is NVIDIA-only.)

For story writing you generate into the framework of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45134144

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.

That’s a nice experiment, but it’s a life simulator and not really a game. There’s little fun in working your way through the first two dungeons and then getting out and being told “no need to go on your epic quest anymore, someone else from the last town beat God and now we’re at peace. Oh, and they got all the powerful artefacts along the way, so there’s literally nothing of interest for you to do anymore. Unless you want to help us plant our crops. That’s what you wanted when you picked Final Fantasy, right? To play a poor version of Harvest Moon instead.”

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

It needs to be a global variable in C. A variable in a function scope or runtime malloc'd spot? No chance of finding a stable spot.

Thankfully, a lot of old games love to use global variables because you can't run out of stack space or allocatable memory. Modern games shy away from that because even the tiniest consoles these days come with gigabytes worth of RAM, even a memory leak has to be a gigantic firehose to bring the system to a halt.

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.

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

Yes I get it the LLM is trained on current news. But it's in very poor taste for the author to post that screenshot.

The cost benefit is really poor, but I also wonder if it's just never been done well.

Old text adventures honestly did this heaps better than modern games do, but the reality is there was a more finite action space for them and it wasn't surprising when something wasn't catered for.

Which games are these? I’d be interested in checking them out.

I’m only aware of experimentation in making more “difficult” NPC AI which was found less enjoyable for obvious reasons, so would be interested to see why similar but different attempts down another path also failed.