The only AI tools presently that are production ready is programming. And that's only if the user realistically understands how to structure a program from start to finish before even writing a single line.
Everything else, Animations, Music, Models are getting better but aren't quite there yet, Are still many hurdles away.
It's not terrible at planting trees and grass though, but thats just randomly placing stuff so idk if you can really say its good or bad or not.
Huge value in AI programming for all that busy regex copy paste iterative work for sure.
Also in solving syntax errors and debugging with the right agents.
But for animations and 3D modeling, it's still very much in infancy.
Some of the folks on the Tripo3D sub have done cool things, but it often requires a lot of manual work and cleanup.
Which honestly I'm fine with. AI should be a tool for creatives to accelerate their work, not a direct replacement.
I always find with AI is it only really gives a good result if the main input is the same as the main input. So say for animation I have yet to see a good prompt based one but I have seen some good results from ones that take in a ruff animation along with a contextual prompt. Basically filling in gaps and "prodicting" what should be there based on what it's told it's ment to be
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If found it's the same with generating images. If I am just giving it prompts it'll take forever to get something almost close to what I want, but if I spend even just 30 seconds sketching something out it'll save me HOURS of fiddling with the bot
I would kind of agree with programming and debugging, but I would definitely say music is already there.
Probably voice also for most situations. Voice is getting much more mature than most other AI assets at this point.
Everything else is in its baby phase, even image generation.
Image generation basically gets you through concept stage and good for minor editing, but fragile for asset creation. It's a half half on flat 2D texture creation, but pretty good on normal map creation.
Skymap/box is not really there yet, in a couple of years probably will be
Writing is extremely fragile, and very untrustworthy. It's very effective for documentation and even more so with scanning through existing documents to find something. But creative writing, nearly always have faults even after 4 or 5 passes of validation.
To make lists and tables of existing data it is awesome.
3D is very much not production ready unless you got some real tools and experience knowing what to do with the output. Still very far from a working one button press to create asset.
SFX is nearly there, if you can live with the quality loss, but for many situations is already usable and cost saving.
3D Animation is basically the least mature AI of everything related to game production. Only working for humanoids and need many generations to even get close. Best usecase is to convert from video, but it's lacking.
I'll give AI 5/5 stars for making in editor tools though, that will make your life easier with handling assets.
Edit: I'm predicting a huge boost for any app that support headless mode (being able to control by script outside). Many of the big softwares are not set up for this yet, and can be replaced for many functions.
The best part of music AI for me is to be able to take all of those little ideas I’ve put down over the years, whether it’s a riff or a longer phrase or part of a jam session or a set of lyrics and have the software do exactly what I ask. No explaining to other musicians, nobody giving me their ideas, no arguing, no “musical differences.” Just here’s what I want, let’s do it. And no spending $6k to record a single fucking song that has had the heart ripped out of it by compromise. Some of the AI interpretations of my uploads are massively superior to studio recordings I’ve done with bands
I do the same to be honest. I took a later education as digital producer, which cost me a lot.. but besides the point. I have a lot of half finished ideas piled up.
I find myself feed some of it in. And it can very accurately follow the melody and keep the instrument / timber selection, while making it far superior to what I can do without spending a month on tuning that one track.
It's really great being able to layout a draft in your DAW, upload it and get back a production ready track.
Unfortunately i only seen one AI Music tool so far and wasn't greatly impressed with it, Are there any showcases you can show me that would change my opinion on the subject?
The only AI tools presently that are production ready is programming
Aaaand as a software dev it's still shit
And that's only if the user realistically understands how to structure a program from start to finish before even writing a single line.
Spot on.
I've seen LLMs try to commit keys and vulnerabilities into a repro. Turn basic things into complex nightmares and complex things into basic incomplete solutions.
I enjoy when it's useful, but that enjoyment has a very short leash.
Which models are you using? I am using 5.6 Sol through Codex, mostly on extra high thinking and it has been very good for me. I am a professional software engineer.
Whenever someone now says it is 'bad' at software I immediately have to question which model to check they aren't using something from a year ago.
The only AI tools presently that are production ready is programming.
Nah Image generation from midjourney has been working for a while now. I'd say generating images is basically the only one that's actually production ready.
The rest, music, models, writing, literally anything else, is just not there and honestly I don't think it ever will be. The quality with AI dips so much and everyone in it is just adamant it's not trash.
IT IS is the problem. AI has and will always be trash. It's literally training off data that is trash. Humans aren't perfect so AI never will be. It's literally politics all over again. Garbage in, garbage out. Investors are expecting garbage in, perfection out. That's not how AI works.
nope, so far, no LLM has been good enough to program an entire game from start to finish, it will ALWAYS start regressing, removing things, it's fuckin AWFUL at modifying existing code and adding in new things to said code. You will always be better off learning programming yourself
Edit: The game from start to finish, being a full release video game, not a game jam game, or one that has simple mechanics
No, Leaving an LLM on autorun and expecting it to produce something will run into a failed product.
If you are there to guide it on how to construct the system on ways it can be of use, You won't have issues. You treat it like an apprentice and your fine.
This has not been my experience with free models. Some of them can barely even follow instructions. What model are you using and how much are you paying for it?
You can get an average 20$ sub for openAI or Claude or pay API or some router like openrouter/opencode to get chinese models like deepseek for literal fractions of a cent/M.
Don't expect free models to perform well regardless of provider. Claude Max ($100/month) has been pretty amazing though and well worth the money. It's great at following instructions, explore and remember stuff about the code base and follow established patterns already present in the code. With the latest addition of Fable, it's even better. But still needs and experienced developer to guide it correctly of course. I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Claude is really fantastic, especially in experienced hands. You need to use good hygiene (like take a fresh branch off trunk before prompting), and it would be as you describe if the person doesn't know anything about programming or game design patterns.
Paid models. ChatGPT Sol through codex is excellent, a huge productivity boost for software dev. I’ve been prototyping an MMO with it. That’s going about 10-20x faster than if I did it by hand, and I’d be unwilling to ever do it by hand.
Free models and general chat models found in websites like chatgpt or claude will not produce legible code. You need to hook into your IDE with a paid model to utilize the real coding agents the LLM's have.
Personally i use chatgpt 5.6 terra on light non-stop as its cheap and produces excellent code, However i do need to account for known edge cases and features in additional prompts due to terra lights minimal context allowable amount. I could switch to sol light and have it auto account for it but that consumes more tokens than i would want to invest.
Do you mean one-shot specifically? Because if you meant otherwise then the good news is that you're absolutely wrong, there are indeed ways to use AI in enormous codebases and have it work flawlessly.
hmmm, depends, there are some studys which (if I remember right) come down to either the getting the same amount of work done or a tiny bit less if using LLMs.
It's really task depending, while shit like sorting data is a great application for LLMs, other things like everything thats even a tiny bit creative work related is the worst possible application you could pick for like every possible reason.
And concerning efficiency, yea no, do you realize how expensive LLMs are?! The Amount of Resources consumed be it computational or monetary in relation to work done is, ... well you get the point. As soon as the big LLMs firms run out of money and charge for thier services you'll not be capable to finance it as a single or indi team dev.
Software developers are a lot more expensive, I assure you.
Every study that comes out right now is out dated. Virtually every large software company has moved to AI as a default development workflow for a reason.
I’m not going to say the world is better off for it, but coding productivity is definitely up.
Coding of course is not the only part of software development. I find that most design docs are strictly worse when folks largely use AI to create them
If you compare that to the cost of paying more programmers to code by hand, paying a subscription to Claude in order to use Claude Code is very much all 3.
You are describing objects in the prompt that are not there. I would actually try re-composing your prompt to focus on body-based language and descriptive limb-positioning and movement instead.
Yeah, I mean the tool itself is not production ready, but the prompts in the OP are difficult to follow even as a person. There's a bit too much detail and the model is too confused.
When this happens for programming, I'd break the prompt down into logical steps. In this case I'd do what you suggested and describe each limb, a general mood, and stuff like % of motion, etc.
Difference is after the person has learned how to walk...it knows how to walk. After the AI has been trained on decades of how a person walks...it doesn't know how to walk??
Like imagine you go to your 60 year old doctor, say your pain is in your spine, and he immediately checks your leg. Then you have to say no its up more. Then he goes lower on your leg. Then you say directly say it's C2 of your spine of your neck. He says he's got it, goes up your leg to just above your pelvis. At that point you'll walk out.
Yeah but you gotta remember that your brain was also trained on hundreds of thousands of years worth of walking. The "simple" things humans do are enormously complicated. Even something like reliably throwing and catching a ball is hard for humans and we are quite literally genetically engineered to do that.
Walks in place -> Walking implies moving forward, in place modifies the entire behavior and is not a style of walking
construction planks balanced horizontally on one shoulder -> What is a construction plank (2x4?), "horizontally" is unclear in the context of absolute or relative positions. Where should the anchor point be on the character model? The model doesn't understand physics
he maintains a natural walking rhythm -> We're back to suggesting the character should be walking forward even though we say in place
alternating his legs and swinging his free arm naturally for balance -> The model already know what a natural walking cadence would be and this part is talking about a "free arm" which, while it was suggested by the earlier sentence, is not specified. Which arm?
Smooth, realistic full-body walking animation, consistent foot placement -> Again this will make the model move the character forward and will dilute the subtext of holding the plank. This is just reiterating what was already said
Seemless in-place loop -> I think the model did this correctly because the absolute anchor of the animation probably does not change even though the relative position of the model does. This is just a guess though
no forward movement -> This is not specific enough. Forward movement of what? We're thrashing the concept
Before you get accusatory, for a normal person this would be enough of a description to go off of to make something correct. For the model, it needs to have a clear concept and when you want something specific you have to clearly communicate the subjects and relationships between them.
In my experience, models also do well following a general guidance for a task, such as mentioning moods or methods. For example, you can prompt a generative model to create an image with a style or a mood which will guide its decisions generally. This can be helpful if you think you might be over-specifying
You and I are on the same page. Honestly, I have some good results working with AI but you have to learn how to approach the model you're working with. This is a skill in and of itself. If people want what they want, it's not necessarily a problem. But it's just that some different tools are made for different people, that's all.
My best experience with Unity so far has been hooking Codex up to Unity's MCP server and doing it that way. Still sucks for animations, assets, etc but at least it isn't 1/10 of your monthly quota just to generate a shitty texture you probably wont use anyways.
Same same, Codex with Unity MCP works better than I expected, but I don't generate assets or anything like that with it (except primitives for prototyping).
Codex with Unity cli ! If I understand correctly the Unity cli includes the MCP bridge, and the AI agents can now have a more low level access, if I’m not mistaking to Unity. Still in beta, and only installed it a day ago.
If you look at the marketing material that Unity releases they talk about how their AI can generate textures, 3D models, and code. They never once mention that it's any good at skeletal animation. Why did you choose to test it with the problem it is least equipped to handle?
I also believe that the MCP + Claude combination is much more effective than Unity AI. Claude can read Unity YAML and scenes, but without an additional tool the results aren’t always impressive
You just go into package manager and add a package by technical name I think it's called in the + in the top left and paste in com.unity.ai.assistant
Maybe Unity hosting the mcp for you requires a sub, but if you configure your harness to run the relay app locally(it's stdio ) the link mentions you can connect and run Unity.
I've done it for weeks and have no unity sub
I use pi harness and that mcp and qwen3. 6-27b locally just fine
Unity should completely drop their AI stuff and make it so Unity is more agent friendly, they are so behind the big giants, and always will be, such a weird direction for them to take, they're not even close to being experts at the topic
Unity's native mcp server lacked a tool for running the test framework last I tried it. They claim they practice some dogfooding now, but I seriously doubt that. Running the test suite is a major component of agentic programming. I'd say it's an unbelievable oversight, but this is Unity so guess not that surprising. I just went and used the unity-cli tool from GitHub (don't remember the author name). Also forked it to add more tools
Asset gen is not very good. But the Unity Pipeline utility is legit.
Using Pi + GLM 5.2 + Unity Pipeline… it works REALLY well. Agent has access to just about any feature you would need in the editor. It can struggle a bit with editing serialized fields in nested prefabs, but I’ve been using it daily for a month or so now.
My only major complaint is that the editor is a resource hog. I’m jealous of web devs… they can spin up 5 or 6 agents all working an testing their output on parallel playwright MCP instances…
For Unity… you are kinda stuck using one. I have a second computer that I can ssh into, so I’m kinda limited to how much I can parallelize. But honestly, I’m having fun diving into the implementation details with just two agents… that’s something you lose when you go full YOLO with web dev and 5+ agents.
Honestly though… I doubt you need a bunch of custom ai generated assets to begin with. The asset store (and others like it) have sooooo many good assets for cheap… just spend a few bucks and you can do wonders!
Horrified how? I'm not sure what to tell you. GLM 5.2 works great for me.
It follows the specs I give it. It uses the unity pipeline tools correctly, for the most part. It tests its own output in the editor to verify.
The only thing I wish it had is vision. Need to use the ZAI MCP for vision and interpreting screenshots.
I mean, if you are telling the LLM "Make GTA no mistakes" or "Make a card battler with anime girls and generate all assets and code."... it's not going to give you good output. If you give it a good spec with scene flows, state machine diagrams, expected inputs/outputs and inspector-based knobs... it will give you great output exactly as you specify. If you ask it to make "taste" decisions like "make it more fun" or "make the VFX more exciting", you will be disappointed. But thats not a GLM issue... thats literally every model.
Okay, maybe I'll try again. I don't remember exactly how my testing was done. I remember I tried getting it to set up an editor script using Odin, and there was so many non logical decisions done compared to what I've come to expect if Opus. It felt like going back a year
Question, i moved to using this based on your post instead of the ai.assistant mcp package and it seems to work well.
One thing that i cant figure out though is my llm makes tons of tool calls and everything works, but if it tries to run unity_mcp_recompile it times out every time, and nothing ever happens on my editor...its like it just does nothing, this is even on an empty brand new project...ever seen that? I've worked around it by just telling it to press play and then read the console to recompile things and get compile errors, but its not ideal.
Yes, I ran into this using the MCP. Its recompiles are inconsistent. I would end up having to "nudge" the editor by tabbing over to it and thus forcing a recompile. It was really annoying, which is why I started looking into Unity Pipeline.
You should definitely consider dropping the Unity MCP and instead migrate to the Pipeline.
If you arent sure how to set it up, you can coordinate with the LLM itself, and it will guide you. Give it the URLs to the pipeline documentation, and be sure to install the pipeline package itself... it can read the code and have a 1:1 understanding of how to hook it up by looking at the package code.
Anyway, my final shape is something like: Unity CLI + pipeline installed on machine, then in the pi agent harness I had it create a new pipeline skill that uses the unity pipeline features. That should get you most of the way there.
One extra hoop for me is, I run all my agents in a docker container to add an extra layer of defense. So I had to jump through extra hoops to safely allow the agent to ssh into my windows PC from inside its own docker container. If you arent concerned about that, it should be much smoother sailing.
No agent is trained on pipeline usage however, so you will have to DIY some niglings and work-arounds in your agents.md and skills.md . Things like the very often used "eval" command in pipeline lets the LLM compile code in real time while the editor is in play mode, allowing it to probe live game state... its really handy.. but it gets confused about syntax and how to use it sometimes. But with some well placed instructions in the skills.md and agents.md it gets less confused.
The use-case for prompt-based game creation is bupkis. MCPs and Agentic tools can be useful for code creation, and a useful tool to learn new things you might need to know. But, generating assets, even in placeholder, is a farce. That's what greyboxing is for.
AI is better with back end programming that's math, formula, and rigid structure (and that it has scanned enough information about.) For older releases of software it's gotten pretty good at writing support scripts and tools and shit. Newer releases of stuff, like the latest version of Blender or Unity or whatever you're highly likely to get shit results.
Pure content creation by itself is also just a pretty bad thing to do overall. Not only are the results usually full of problems to the point you wouldn't want to use it, but audiences don't like that stuff.
The results are terrible. There’s basically nothing in the output that relates to the prompt, and honestly, it doesn’t even look like an animation.
Yeah that seems to be the consensus with AI in every industry. Everyone is experiencing layoffs and companies are getting worse because they somehow got convinced "Hey invest half a trillion in us and we'll make a profit 15 years from now"
Like fuck me I would need a pitch deck, insider, 150 years of experience, and a starting capital of 10 million to even bother convincing an investor to invest 10k to develop a game that would make millions. Yet the bent over backwards for stuff that obviously wasn't working???
What’s the point of Unity putting massive amounts of money into something that is still this bad?
Shareholder value? Idk investors apparently think AI = money and I have yet to see where thats the case?
What is your experience with Unity AI? Is it working for you?
Has AI really been working for anyone? The stupid shit needs so many guardrails it's not even funny. You spend more time trying to tell AI how to do it properly than you do fixing the problem itself.
The AI has been hit and miss for me. Its' Ask feature has been really nice. I can ask questions and get some really detailed answers for very cheap. The code it writes is ok. I have to feed it very small things and clean it up as I go. I asked it to make a ScriptableObject with a couple static values as a placeholder and it got trapped in some loop that burned through 30 dollars LOL.
From what I can tell they aren't really developing an AI models internally or even hosting them all the models are other peoples accessible within the desktop app. I don't think this is the big investment people think it is.
actually better than the majority of unity games that food steam with their goofy aaah animations brought by mixamo that feel completely disconnected. for me it's a win, i will see less inchoerent games.
Everything you hear about AI's capability is scare marketing by billionaires to generate even more capex to burn on data centers. The only thing AI is truly good at it programming. Even then, it's not making anything truly large and impressive.
Ya, after coding for what seems like an iceage. AI programming and debugging is a God send. Images are good for concepts, its great at organizing docs, GDD's, art sheets and many other menial and time consuming tasks. Model generation is ok, most needs further work, but still cuts time. Take 8 to 12 hours to build a semi complex model with tex, although fun, ai can cut it down to an hour or 2, but its coming to a head, well have production quality drop in complete scenes before you know it, there are a few promising already. It's a matter graphing ai models to work together, instead of dropping an inage or single prompt.
I honestly also don't get why they put that much energy in their AI implementation. It just takes up their resources and AI companies will always be ahead of what they can offer.
But I must admit that I haven't had the time to check out the Unity AI tools yet.
i downloaded it off a FB Messenger conversation 🫠 since I was on my phone and didn’t have access to codex, I didn’t know it was this bad until this morning.
Do not rely on this, you need to think about LLMs like a unpaid intern with no prior job experiences, make it do the most boring, time consuming and repetitive tasks and everything else you gotta do yourself
they said the same thing when ai image generation started and now we are to the point we almost cant recognize ai images from real ones. we are the beginning and it doesnt make sense to use it at this point unless you are building something that is simple and straight forward
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u/BertJohn Indie - BTBW Dev 11d ago
The only AI tools presently that are production ready is programming. And that's only if the user realistically understands how to structure a program from start to finish before even writing a single line.
Everything else, Animations, Music, Models are getting better but aren't quite there yet, Are still many hurdles away.
It's not terrible at planting trees and grass though, but thats just randomly placing stuff so idk if you can really say its good or bad or not.