Excerpts:

The Verbal Verdict demo drops me into an interrogation room with basic facts about the case to my left, and on the other side of a glass window are three suspects I can call one at a time for questioning. There are no prompts or briefings—I just have to start asking questions, either by typing them or speaking them into a microphone

The responses are mostly natural, and at times add just a bit more information for me to follow up on.

Mostly. Sometimes, the AI goes entirely off the rails and starts typing gibberish

There are, of course, still many limitations to this implementation of an LLM in a game. Kristelijn said that they are using a pretty “censored” model, and also adding their own restrictions, to make sure the LLM doesn’t say anything harmful. It also makes what should be a very small game much larger (the demo is more than 7GB), because it runs the model locally on your machine. Kristelijn said that running the model locally helps Savanna Developments with privacy concerns. If the LLM runs locally it doesn’t have to see or handle what players are typing. And it also is better for game preservation because if the game doesn’t need to connect to an online server it can keep running even if Savanna Developments shuts down.

it’s pretty hard to “write” different voices for them. They all kind of speak similarly. One character in the full version of the game, for example, speaks in short sentences to convey a certain attitude, but that doesn’t come close to the characterization you’d see in a game like L.A. Noire, where character dialogue is meticulously written to convey personality.

  • memfree@beehaw.orgOP
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    ·
    4 months ago

    NOTE: I just downloaded the game and on my first attempted launch, it complained that the port it wanted was not open. My only option was to close the game. I ran netstat and did not see the port listed, so I tried again. THAT time, it complained about my older video card :-/ The warning is clunky and there’s a typo, too (within -> withing). It says (if I transcribed accurately):

    You are using an: NVIDIA GEOFORCE GTX 1080. This video card is currently not recognized withing the recommended specs. We only support a limited amount of NVIDIA GTX graphics cards, all NVIDIA RTX graphics cards or all AMD RX graphics cards since the local AI requires a lot of performance.

    So please note that the game might not work properly. Refer to the Steam guide for more information.

    When I closed that warning, the game loaded.

      • ninjan@lemmy.mildgrim.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        4 months ago

        It likely starts the LLM it uses as a service, and it requires running on a port. They could of course have rewritten it to not use a port and instead use other mechanisms possible when you’re in control of the code but then that requires modification of the LLM project they use and would make updating its version harder so such a thing would be reserved for the full release or skipped all together because it’s not really a big deal. All this assuming that they do use one of the hundreds of open source local LLM projects floating around Github.

        • zaphod@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          edit-2
          4 months ago

          So laziness. Got it.

          (They could easily move to an ipc mechanism that doesn’t require binding a port on a network interface but that’d require time and effort and why bother when the goal is to ship something fast and cheap while the AI hype is strong)

          Sounds like a fun way to directly mess with their model though.

      • Mixel@feddit.de
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        4 months ago

        Probably or the ai if I should have guessed in the backend it’s using something like local ai, koboldcpp, llamacpp probably

  • Fisch@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    4 months ago

    Since I learned about LLMs when ChatGPT became popular, the one thing I wanted to see was games where you can actually talk to NPCs (using a locally running LLM like here, not using ChatGPT) and it’s cool to see that we’re getting closer and closer to that

    • derbis@beehaw.org
      cake
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      4 months ago

      There’s a Stardew valley mod that does this but it seems development has stalled

      • Fisch@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        4 months ago

        That’s really cool. I also heard about a Skyrim mod that does this too and since I’m playing Skyrim in VR (modded ofc) that would make it even cooler.

    • Big P@feddit.uk
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      4 months ago

      This is the only actually good use of LLMs I can really think of. As long as there is a good way to keep them within the bounds of the actual story it would be great for that

      • blindsight@beehaw.org
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        4 months ago

        I think they also have potential for creating lots of variations in dialogue pre-run in a database, and manually checked by a writer for QC.

        The problem with locally-run LLMs is that the good ones require massive amounts of video memory, so it’s just not feasible anytime soon. And the small ones are, well, crappy. And slow. And still huge (8GB+).

        That of course means you can’t get truly dynamic branching dialogue, but it can enable things like getting thousands of NPC lines instead of “I took an arrow to the knee” from every guard in every city.

        It can also be used to generate dialogue, too, so not just one-liners, but “real” NPC conversations (or rich branching dialogue options for players to select.)

        I’m very skeptical that we’ll get “good” dynamic LLM content in games, running locally, this decade.

  • SavvyWolf@pawb.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    4 months ago

    I’ve played Ace Attorney and the writers put a lot of love and personality into the characters. I’d be sceptical if an AI could get close enough to any kind of writing style to “kill” writing in games like that.

    Honestly getting fed up of AI doing a mediocre job of creating art and then people claiming it kills whole industries because it’s the “in” technology.

      • spriteblood@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        4 months ago

        The amount of time to build something like this seems like it would offset the amount of effort it would take just to write good character dialogue. AI tools are basically word calculators, which means you have to provide data for the LLM, which means time to produce this data, time to build guardrails, etc. Even in this implementation, they say they had to build guardrails so that they don’t say anything “harmful.”

        There are also a number of lawsuits going on that will set a precedent for how training data can be utilized in commercial products. While I expect them to take the side of large corporations with vast resources at the expense of ethics, there’s the possibility that they will do the right thing. This will affect how AI tools wil be used in such contexts.

  • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    4 months ago

    I wonder if were gonna start seeing modular specialized game drivers to save space and work.

    We already have shared libraries for gamepad controlles and such. Why not one that handles a large language model , one for raytraced light. Maybe even an image generator for patterns in creative building games.

    These would need to be standardized and able to be further molded, processed , restricted by the actual games.

    Obvious the Triple Ass studios will want you to pay for online services but I legitimately believe there is a future for open source gaming and this could potentially save allot of hair pulling for some nonprofit indie devs.