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Regarding the cost: I think in a practical application (i.e. a game), it might be feasible to "lazy load" the world. If I remember correctly, watchdogs 2 does

by Garlef 4y ago

Regarding the cost: I think in a practical application (i.e. a game), it might be feasible to "lazy load" the world. If I remember correctly, watchdogs 2 does something like this. Need a new character? Just create it on the fly. You'd have make be sure to create all the necessary background structures as neighborhood, family ties, etc as well. Or at least mark make sure you don't introduce (glaring) inconsistencies.

throwawayffffas 4y ago
I have been thinking how I would go about creating a game world that feels populated and scales. My idea is very similar to this, having a world simulated mostly with statistics, i.e so and so town has population such and such and only generate the characters, environments the character directly interacts with.
- RugnirViking 4y ago
  That's how dwarf fortress works. It has a system of "sites" which are locations with population statistics broken down into race and profession, which interact with each other via wars and trading caravans and the like. There are separately a smaller but still large population of historical figures whose lives are described in much more detail and who are picked to do things like lead armies & caravans, or who compete in races/competitons etc. Finally those people you actually interact with have their skills/personally inferred from their history (they were once a tavern keep? they must have good consoler skill etc. They probably aren't also an introvert)
throwaway4aday 4y ago
I got the feeling while reading the article that you could lean more heavily on procedural generation in order to reduce costs. Using GPT-3 for name generation is overkill. There are plenty of lists out there to use and if you want 100% unique names you can create a probabilistic name generator that uses letter or phoneme frequencies to spit out convincing sounding names. Generating the layout of buildings and their locations on a map or within a city is also a fairly well solved procedural generation problem with lots of different methods. I'm even tempted to say that things like the professions and relationships between characters would be better off being procedural and then let GPT fill in the dramatic details or fantastical job titles and descriptions. Basically, all the boring and well established stuff should be procedural and then use GPT to make it exciting by writing narratives and plots as well as adding the setting.

by Garlef 4y ago

throwawayffffas 4y ago

I have been thinking how I would go about creating a game world that feels populated and scales. My idea is very similar to this, having a world simulated mostly with statistics, i.e so and so town has population such and such and only generate the characters, environments the character directly interacts with.

RugnirViking 4y ago
That's how dwarf fortress works. It has a system of "sites" which are locations with population statistics broken down into race and profession, which interact with each other via wars and trading caravans and the like. There are separately a smaller but still large population of historical figures whose lives are described in much more detail and who are picked to do things like lead armies & caravans, or who compete in races/competitons etc. Finally those people you actually interact with have their skills/personally inferred from their history (they were once a tavern keep? they must have good consoler skill etc. They probably aren't also an introvert)

throwaway4aday 4y ago

I got the feeling while reading the article that you could lean more heavily on procedural generation in order to reduce costs. Using GPT-3 for name generation is overkill. There are plenty of lists out there to use and if you want 100% unique names you can create a probabilistic name generator that uses letter or phoneme frequencies to spit out convincing sounding names. Generating the layout of buildings and their locations on a map or within a city is also a fairly well solved procedural generation problem with lots of different methods. I'm even tempted to say that things like the professions and relationships between characters would be better off being procedural and then let GPT fill in the dramatic details or fantastical job titles and descriptions. Basically, all the boring and well established stuff should be procedural and then use GPT to make it exciting by writing narratives and plots as well as adding the setting.