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MarioGPT Uses AI to Generate Endless Super Mario Levels for Free
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y agoThis is neat and all, but procedural 2D level generation can be done really well just with simple heuristics, see Spelunky from 2008. And that can be built into the game and computed efficiently on the fly, not requiring an internet connection.
- codetiger 4y agoCame here to post the same thing. Procedural level generation has been there for a while and it does not need advanced AI. Probably if the same thing was done for games like Call of Duty or Medal of Honour type games, it would be more impressive.
- dpflan 4y agoAnd cheaper (compared to the upfront cost to get to the point of GPT doing this versus classic methods).
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y agoMinecraft is a notable example of 3D procedural generation. It's so much more complicated than Spelunky though. But definitely impressive.
- taeric 4y agoIsn't that the secret, though? Sufficiently advanced procedurally generated content is indistinguishable from AI.
- codetiger 4y agoAgreed, my argument is only on "sufficiently advanced". Mario is super simple to create a AI for this purpose. And the levels look very unhuman generated. :)
- Wowfunhappy 4y agoIsn't Spelunky rearranging level pieces which were designed by a human? I imagine if you played it long enough, you'd start to recognize the pieces.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y agoEffectively, yes. Although a lot of additional things are also randomized like item/enemy spawns. Then for Spelunky 2 there's the randomizer mod which randomizes almost everything. It pretty much never ceases to surprise you. Look up spelunky 2 randomizer on Youtube to see for yourself.
- sh4rks 4y agoA lot of roguelikes (e.g. Dcss) do this as well. I'd be interested to see a game with truly random procedurally generated levels, though the levels may end up being repetitive and mundane.
- oneoff786 4y agoI don’t believe that’s true. DCSS is mostly true procedural generation from a seed against constraints. There however some special fixed layouts for final floors, and small predefined vault rooms.
- skyyler 4y agoI've played an absolute fuckton of DCSS and it is true. There are small "blocks" that you'll see over and over that are exactly the same. The best example I can give is the room Crazy Yiuf hangs out in with the tree hallway leading to it.
- oneoff786 4y agoThat is a vault Edit: not to be confused with the Vaults floor* Vaults are custom handcrafted rooms.
- astrospective 4y ago
- Larrikin 4y agoI assume this is why Angry Birds 2 is such a terrible game compared to previous incarnations. All the levels get a base then a random generation of enemies. I wonder if it's actually possible to beat all incarnations, as many times I will get to a level, lose all my hearts a few hours or days in a row then easily complete the level without really learning any tricks or strategy. It has served as a good example to teach kids in my life about the scam of digital artificial scarcity employed by the game by making you wait for hearts or pay.
- hotpotamus 4y agoThe first game I played and was aware that it was procedurally generated, though I would not have known that term as a child, was the first Diablo, and a quick search shows that it was already a well-established concept by then, going back to the late 70's/early 80's.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- a13o 4y agoThe secret to Mario games is a new gimmick introduced every level. They've gotten better at this over the years, and Mario 1 + Lost Levels is the worst example of it. That makes it a great comp for GPT-3 which can churn out an endless supply of flavorless brick & pipe levels and still feel vaguely Mario 1. Were this tool to live up to the hype of "indies punching above their weight", it would need to design novel platformer mechanics. The work it's doing isn't the hard part of platformer level design. For another example of why this isn't commercially viable, look at what happened with Super Mario Maker. In that game _humans_ are given a fixed set of Mario doodads with which to build levels. But Nintendo kept the secret sauce for themselves - the ability to create new doodads. What follows is millions of derivative Mario levels unworthy of their own game. Even if you trained MarioGPT on the rich set of level data available in Mario Maker, you would not have an algorithm that makes commercially viable Mario levels.
- asddubs 4y agomario maker had lots of levels combining the different mechanics in new and unforeseen ways, and even using glitches to create new mechanics.
- kibwen 4y ago> What follows is millions of derivative Mario levels unworthy of their own game. It doesn't refute your point, but what actually happened was that brilliant tinkerers found ingenious ways to combine the basic tools to create whole new classes of advanced gadgets that enable styles of gameplay not intended by Nintendo. Here's a playlist with some examples and tutorials: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLekbcfvMB1gYieKXixxXVBTYCuWRKvxjK https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLekbcfvMB1gYieKXixxXVBTYC...
- levesque 4y agoYeah OP missed the target on this one. Super Mario Maker is a great example of insane creativity demonstrated by a community. AI can't do that though.
- 4y ago
- jhoelzel 4y agoPort Mario to WebGL, integrate this model, tell you friend he gets 100 bucks when he beats the level ;) On another thought: this could probably replace the chrome dino pretty well
- sylware 4y agoI wonder if ML will find its way to maths as a assistive intuition.
- nomilk 4y agoAre the levels playable, or just static lookalikes without moving parts? Incidentally, there's a nice example of a text representation of a level in the source code (requires scrolling horizontally, which isn't totally obvious from the GitHub UI): https://github.com/shyamsn97/mario-gpt/blob/main/mario_gpt/level.py https://github.com/shyamsn97/mario-gpt/blob/main/mario_gpt/l... Some parts are recognisable, for example the flag pole (which is typically at the end of mario levels, I believe).
- shyamsn97 4y agoHey! One of the authors of the paper here. Actually, many of our generated levels are playable because our model actually predicts the path of a search algorithm (A* agent) that was able to solve a ton of levels. MarioGPT is not always perfect though, as it sometimes predicts impossible jumps lol
- nomilk 4y agoVery cool, it's an awesome project, and thanks also for replying!
- tantalor 4y agohttps://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.05981.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.05981.pdf
- vyrotek 4y agoI'm surprised there haven't been more games like Cloudberry Kingdom. It has fantastic level generation with a bunch of settings to play with. Players can even have various movement abilities which the level generation considers. If you got stuck it provided an AI to follow. https://store.steampowered.com/app/210870/Cloudberry_Kingdom/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/210870/Cloudberry_Kingdom...
- lldb 4y agoI remember having this one on the Wii U... Each level wasn't as much a level but more a short "trick" the player had to complete. It seemed to choose a path first, then place obstacles just narrowly avoiding the chosen path.
- gigel82 4y agoIt's interesting because this is using GPT-2 (https://huggingface.co/distilgpt2 https://huggingface.co/distilgpt2 specifically) which you can just fine on a reasonable GPU. But I'm not convinced the results are any smarter than a randomized procedural generation (I'm sure using it for text generation instead will yield sub-par results).
- anthk 4y agoRetux and Wario Land like games make better levels for sure because of the puzzles.
- rolenthedeep 4y agoCan't wait to see someone hook this into an AI that plays the levels and put it on Twitch