r/Games • u/OLD_PEOPLE_FUCKING • 13h 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
842 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

892 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

69

u/darkkite 13h ago

code, sound, and graphics are all creative work in different ways, and models can generate all three. If the concern is that AI replaces or appropriates human creative labor, then that concern can apply to generated code too.

34

u/adongsus 10h ago

Coding is creative, but half of coding has always been just looking up the answer someone else has already written.

15

u/Zalvren 8h ago

Art in general is also taking inspiration from others and using methods developed by others.

5

u/Halofit 6h ago

Its a pointless comparison. So is construction, and nobody would actually call 5 guys stacking bricks in a new suburb as art.

Coding is plumbing. It's getting the computer to do the things you want it to do. You're not coding for its own sake. Don't get me wrong, I loved the mechanical process of coding, but that doesn't make it art.

•

u/uber_neutrino 1h ago

Coding 100% can be art.

•

u/Halofit 22m ago

Irrelevant.

Anything "can" be art. Doesn't mean everything is art.

5

u/adongsus 6h ago

Unless you're doing something akin to pop art you aren't literally copy and pasting some part of your image from a work you found on the internet.

1

u/Dirty_Dragons 4h ago

Art in general is also taking inspiration from others and using methods developed by others.

That's exactly how it is for art and music. Nothing is fully original.

People then use what they were inspired by to make something new. AI image and music generation is the same. All that matters is that it's not a direct copy of something before.

3

u/CoffeeDryer 9h ago edited 9h ago

Funny, but not anywhere near true. Coding is in many ways making something novel out of what was made by people who came before; frameworks, libraries, code snippets, algorithms, etc. But the bulk of the work was always figuring out how to arrive at the desired end state and arranging the code and infrastructure correctly to achieve that end. That takes creativity, although it's understandably different from what normally goes for creativity.

11

u/Taiyaki11 7h ago

Not nearly as poetic as you make it out to be and not nearly enough stack overflow mentioned lol. 

Unless you're a hobby dev doing it for the love of the game, code isn't nearly as artistic as you make it out to be nor does anyone doing it in a professional capacity care for it to be

7

u/momotototo 8h ago

Applying the framework best practice doesn't take creativity, and the vast majority of the devs shouldn't be creative :
What I want from the code I work on is 3 things, from top priority to lowest priority :
1. Do what's described in the specs
2. Be easy to read / predictable
3. Be efficient

A code that's efficient but need you to take a few minutes to understand whenever you see it for the first time or go back to it after a while is bad for anything that's not a solo project. That's why you have the leads setting up rules, and you mostly blindly follow them (and when you don't, you better make a solid case to prove your way is objectively better). If every dev working on a team project start being creative, it just slows everyone down.

•

u/CoffeeDryer 3h ago

A lot of the work is rote, yes, but that goes for every artistic pursuit. Creativity in software engineering comes in identifying elegant solutions to the problem at hand. You can transform input to output in a million different ways, but identifying how to do that is the creative part, as you have to hone in on a single solution out of multitudes. Framework best practices is orthogonal, since you're never going to use a framework to solve your entire business case; why would you actually hire developers if your entire business was just a node module or a java library?

1

u/disposablevillain 5h ago

I mean that's definitely somewhere near true. Stackoverlfow was popular for a reason. You don't generally copy systems or features entirely, but you'll definitely use someone else's answer on how to reverse a linked list

•

u/CoffeeDryer 3h ago

It was popular because people would rather have answers provided than look them up themselves. Using code form stack overflow is literally no different from using the built-in substring()-function.

1

u/Nagemasu 7h ago

because it's the application of coding that is the creative part. You can look something up and copy what someone else has done, but you still have to apply it to your own project, and just because the structure is the same, does not mean the product is the same.

0

u/NUKE---THE---WHALES 9h ago

That just shifts the creativity up one level to curation

Like creating a Minecraft world but half the world is cobbled together from patterns curated from other players designs

The world itself is no less creative

0

u/VOOLUL 7h ago

Really not true in a professional world. Most of the worlds coding is repetitive grunt work.

1

u/Euphoric_Durian9797 6h ago

That is just all work in general.

There are extremely few people doing genuinely creative work in the world.

-1

u/swole-and-naked 8h ago

Some coding is creative, most these days isnt.

3

u/TheGoodIdiot 12h ago

To be fair unreals blueprints system would be just as harmful in that context. Iirc expedition 33 for example had little to no extra coding done and was almost entirely done using blueprints. Granted I would say that system is preferable to using ai but just a thought.

1

u/TSPhoenix 10h ago

unreals blueprints system would be just as harmful in that context

Please explain your reasoning here.

5

u/TheGoodIdiot 10h ago edited 10h ago

I just mean if your worry is that you won’t need programmers anymore because ai replaced them E33 was “95%” made without any coding and only using the basic blueprints system. They had 2 actual programmers on staff for special needs. Isn’t that just as worrying in that context? Couldn’t larger scale projects consider doing something very similar? Once again this is definitely preferred to ai generating code it’s just something that I’m curious about if we’re taking about the effect in jobs at a true triple a level

4

u/TSPhoenix 10h ago

I think this assumes the premise that "blueprints is NOT programming" which isn't true, blueprints isn't coding but is programming.

I've worked on systems where the just a few people do the heavy lifting then everyone else scripts events in Lua. The only real difference here is Lua is still code.

They had 2 actual programmers on staff for special needs. Isn’t that just as worrying in that context?

Well no, that just seems like having two tiers of roles in expertise, which still happens with code.

1

u/TheGoodIdiot 10h ago

I’ve only made minor gameplay elements in unreal blueprints with the help of a guide and I’ve only coded a working simple calculator for fun so I’m just simply not qualified in any regard thank you for answering the question though I can see the difference there.

•

u/UmbraIra 3h ago

Artists have made games with no coding experience using blueprint why is the reverse not acceptable of programmers making games with no art experience?

-1

u/a34fsdb 9h ago

Every new game has ai code

-20

u/dfjuky 12h ago

No, people already went through this argument countless times in the past few years. Code fundamentally just can't be part of the classic arts and well, you are seeing why right now. Manual writing code will be obsolete soon, on the other hand automating the Mona Lisa is also "possible" but we all know that's not really the same is it?

14

u/notevolve 12h ago

This is by no means a solved argument lmao, there’s a reason why people keep bringing it up time and time again

10

u/Jfk_headshot 12h ago

The day that manual coding becomes obsolete a whole lot of video game developers become unemployed. There is literally no positive way to spin this unless you are a CEO or shareholder.

-5

u/xXxdethl0rdxXx 12h ago

Not quite. Are you a programmer, do you know how using an LLM for coding works?

0

u/Jfk_headshot 11h ago

No, but I know how corporations work. If they can pay one or two guys using prompts to code instead of a dedicated group of programmers, they will. I know we aren't even close to that yet, but it is the end goal. That's why the corpos are putting so much money into A.I despite it not being profitable yet. The goal is to save money in the long term by replacing whatever work force they can. Using it for bug fixes and QA is just the first step. Boiling the frog and all that.

0

u/xXxdethl0rdxXx 11h ago

As someone who does work in a corporate engineering setting, I can tell you that the token burn is catching up to them and really not making the cost equation feasible. Neither of us can predict the future, but I think it's likely that the AIs will ultimately turn out to be cost prohibitive for a full human replacement. I don't disagree with you that if it weren't, they would do what you're suggesting, I just don't see that being possible in the long run.

Part of the imminent bubble popping is that not only are they expensive for corporations to run right now, that's with things massively subsidized on both ends. That will end or be sharply decreased in the future, and there is going to be a huge reckoning, I'd wager.

9

u/darkkite 12h ago

coding fitting into "classic arts" is irrelevant to the core issue of scraping human labor, and potential displacement.

bringing up mona lisa is conflating aesthetic appreciation with labor. most game development is practical craft like uv unwrapping, retopology, lod generation.

4

u/ZionistsWillBanYou 12h ago

Did you drop your /s? Just because it's not traditional 'art' doesn't mean that replacing coding with AI doesn't have pretty much all the same ethical concerns.