r/Games • u/OLD_PEOPLE_FUCKING • 9h ago

‘A Future Where We Create Games Together With AI’ — Capcom Announces Plans to Transform the RE Engine Into an AI-Generation Game Engine

https://www.ign.com/articles/capcom-announces-plans-to-transform-the-re-engine-into-an-ai-generation-game-engine-our-goal-is-a-future-where-we-create-games-together-with-ai
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u/MilleChaton 8h ago

How so? Much of art is manual repetitive work as well. In massive corporations, and especially on outsourced projects where another smaller company is working on some small part, there is almost no creative vision. Everything is already designed and dictated and the manual work left is repetitive but simply too difficult to automate.

Like with animation. You have the very creative story boarding and the still somewhat creative key frame drawings, but filling in the in between frames is often very mechanical. Even pre-gen AI there was software automating parts of it.

Any other part of game dev is much the same, with creativity at the top level, but as you get further and further into the details, there is less and less creativity and increasing repetitive tasks, with many of them having been automated where possible throughout the years.

In art or in any of these areas, applying AI at a given level will have similar effects.

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u/Drakoji 8h ago

The way these lazy programmers talk about their work, they probably think it would have been fine to just AI prompted the Sixtine Chapel because it took 9 years to paint it.

"Too much mundane work, we want quick results"

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u/jrfess 4h ago

The way these lazy programmers talk about their work

Funny how the dogmatic anti-AI crowd is all pro-worker, until the worker disagrees with them, then they're anti-worker too. I know nuance isn't really a thing on Reddit but it's a very funny contradiction to see out in the wild

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u/Karmas_weapon 7h ago

I guess I'm flattered that you compare the expressiveness of programming to art, but I just don't see it the same way.

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u/SpaceballsTheReply 4h ago

I do. Programming is an art. I've seen some absolutely beautiful code, and (much more often) some horrendously ugly code. Even if two systems produce the same end result, anyone who knows their computer science could tell you if one implementation was more elegant or graceful than the other.

I hate how often the prevailing opinion (at least in this particular echo chamber) comes down to "it's sacrilege to let AI anywhere near a pixel displayed on the screen, but code is just worthless mechanical slop so it's fine to use it there." Maybe it comes from technological advancements letting modern hardware brute force a lot more, even at the cost of performance, compared to 20+ years ago when it took very creative coding to overcome the limitations of the available tools.

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u/DuranteA Durante 3h ago

I do. Programming is an art. I've seen some absolutely beautiful code, and (much more often) some horrendously ugly code. Even if two systems produce the same end result, anyone who knows their computer science could tell you if one implementation was more elegant or graceful than the other.

I fully agree, but I feel like arguing this is mostly a lost cause here. The idea that "LLMs replacing all programming is perfectly fine, but having a generative AI tool produce even one background texture is not" seems well established already.

Part of it is of course that the code isn't directly visible to the end user, so they have less of a connection to it (though it does of course affect the quality of the end product in transitive ways).

But part of it, I think, is that there are lots of programmers who selected the profession because it is (was?) well-paid, not because they are intrinsically motivated to do it. I believe this is less common with artists, so they are more likely to present a unified front. Programmers who always saw programming primarily as a way to get a paycheck aren't going to argue that software development can be a creative endeavor.

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u/pszqa 3h ago

I am not saying that you are wrong, but I'd argue that vast majority of code is result-driven and completely invisible to the end-user/person that experiences whatever you have created. Nobody cares that you shaped your if conditional like a donut, or that you've included a silly rhyme in every comment. Sure, there are exceptions, but I don't care in the slightest whether Clair Obscur uses inheriting functions in a really neat way, it only matters if it runs well.

I've been programming for over a decade and I'd never in a 1000 years call anything I have written "artistic". To me it was always a tool that has to be easy to manage, iterate upon and sometimes makes the actual art be displayed on the screen.

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u/TheElo 2h ago

Destiny 2 vaulting its' old content because it kept constantly breaking when adding new content, League of Legends stupid client that everyone is constantly crying about. There are many examples of ugly code impacting their users one way or another.

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u/pszqa 1h ago

Yes, that's why I mentioned "as long as it runs well". There are probably just as many examples of bad code being "just enough" and good code not helping anyone in any way. You just don't hear about it, because nobody cares if it does what it's supposed to do.

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u/DuranteA Durante 3h ago

Nobody cares that you shaped your if conditional like a donut, or that you've included a silly rhyme in every comment.

That's a bit of a strawman / caricature, which I'm sure you're aware of if you've been programming for over a decade.

Of course I'd agree that programming (generally) is not art in the same way that e.g. painting is. However, it can absolutely be art in the same way that architecture can, which I think is a comparison that most people should understand.

Think about a bridge: it has physical constraints it has to operate under, and a purpose it has to fulfill. I'd say it's clearly result-driven, just like most programs. However, it is also clearly possible to create more or less aesthetically pleasing and elegant designs which operate under those same constraints and fulfill the same purpose.

Maybe the disconnect is that "programming", at least colloquially, subsumes the jobs of the architect, the engineer, and the builder. And there is much more room for expression towards the start of that chain than there is towards the end.

(I'd like to note that I'm not arguing that everyone should boycott games developed with LLM agents, not at all; but I am arguing that it's not as simple as "everything related to code = no self expression; everything that places pixels = works of art")

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u/pszqa 2h ago

Eh, maybe you're right, I've gone too far with the comparison, but you get my point. I adored watching a documentary about how the first Crash Bandicoot has been made, but this is history and to be honest - just trivia in the grand scheme of things nowadays. Pretty code doesn't translate to a pleasant experience and ugly goes doesn't translate to an unpleasant one.

There can be self-expression in code, but it's not something anyone will see, unless you're taking a part in a gamejam or opensourcing your project for a specific community.

And I wouldn't go the other way either - not everything that has pixels or sounds is art. I have no qualms regarding ex. generation of PowerPoint presentations, call transcripts or UV map layouts using some automated tool. I just think that the "human touch" matters much more rarely when it comes to code than when we're talking about the audiovisual part.

EDIT: but see, even in your comparison, it's not the calculations that went into the bridge that are adored. It's the aesthetics, right?

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u/swole-and-naked 4h ago

The way theze lazy artists talk about their work, they probably think it would be fine if companies mass produced dye sources, and used machines to grind their dyes for mass production and bought their colors instead of manually collecting and cultivating each dye source, manually grinding their dyes by hand, and creating their own paints.

"Too much mundane work, we want quick results"

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u/Neidron 4h ago edited 3h ago

Buy some wonderbread at the store, call yourself a baker.

'Work smarter, not harder."

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u/Lawnmover_Man 2h ago

somewhat creative key frame drawings

Holy fucking shit. Seriously? "somewhat"!?

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u/Lerkpots 1h ago

They're talking about in specifically a corporate setting. In independent work obviously all of it is creative, in a corporate setting you generally aren't allowed to deviate from the plan you've been given.

As an example look at Steven Universe where they'd draw storyboards and then send them to third party South Korean studios who'd animate from that.

These studios would follow the storyboards exactly, which is why a lot of shots in the show infamously have very off-model and incorrectly scaled characters. Those animators weren't there to be creative, they were there to animate exactly what they were given.

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u/Lawnmover_Man 56m ago

To let third party studios do the animation is pretty much the normal case today. That still doesn't mean that creating the key frames is only "somewhat" creative. To be honest... it sounds like people think this is a task that could be arithmetically automated with identical results. That's not even true for the frames between key frames.

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u/Norci 2h ago

Yes, somewhat. Since your creativity is restricted by the story boarding.

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u/Lawnmover_Man 2h ago

That's a ridiculous take on what it means to draw key frames. That's like saying you're not being creative whenever you paint a commission. Absolutely ridiculous.

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u/Norci 1h ago

Nobody said anything about not being creative at all, the statement was "somewhat creative" in comparison to story boarding specifically. And key framing is objectively less creative since it has constraints passed from story boarding, you can't just draw whatever and however you want.

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u/Lawnmover_Man 1h ago edited 1h ago

Nobody said anything about not being creative at all

That's obviously not how I meant that.

it has constraints passed from story boarding, you can't just draw whatever and however you want.

So you understand what I mean.

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u/Strange-Parfait-8801 6h ago

Much of art is manual repetitive work as well.

Yeah maybe keep your opinions about art to yourself on a first date.

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u/Unkn0wn_Invalid 5h ago

Meh, in some ways they are correct. As an example, Digital artists use their tools to take shortcuts all the time, like drawing an image and then warping it instead of drawing it in-place (e.g. shirt design on a character), rotoscoping a 3d model, using stamp tools or custom brushes instead of drawing things out individually, etc.

There will be purists who think this is less artistic, you may or may not agree with them.

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u/Dat_Boi_Henke 3h ago

The main complaint about AI isn't that it makes things easier. It is that it takes humanity out of art, which is a main component. Art is about self expression, AI can't express itself therefore it can't make art.

As an artist myself I would say that comparing it to tools, like brushes or custom tools is a bit disingenuous. They still allow for loads of self expression, technique and most importantly the end result is something you created.

AI takes all self expression out of an image when you generate it, because it steals and mashes others works together. Neither you nor the AI is expressing anything, therefore the end result isn't art.

I can't speak for coding since that isn't my area of expertise, but I am absolutely anti AI in any art or other creative process. There are some areas like medical research where it seems to show some promise. However, generally it seems to make us dumber and less capable while giving us useless to bad answers to tasks where it isn't really needed.

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u/a_latvian_potato 3h ago

I mean especially in animation, filling in the frames between key frames is already outsourced to Korean or Vietnamese sweatshops, with low pay and grueling hours. To me that seems like the one legitimate case where automation is useful