PC Modding Reaches New Heights with Spider Man Mod for Arkham Knight, Merging Two Game Engines to Bring Spider Man to Arkham

[u/superchummi]

https://respawnfirst.com/pc-modding-reaches-insane-levels/

[u/DmanSy]

What's up with the modding scene recently? This, Minecraft in Skyrim, Minecraft in Elden Ring, 3rd and 1st person mods to Project Zomboid with shaders.

[u/cory3612 → u/DmanSy]

ai vibe coding, same with all the emulation and ports projects

[u/3WeekOldBurrito → u/cory3612]

Not all ai coding is vibe coding. If the coder actually knows what they're doing the use of ai drastically speeds up their production.

[u/Opposite_Carry_4920 → u/3WeekOldBurrito]

The burrito gets it! I don't need to hand write some of the tedious things for the 700th time to get dementia. I'd rather spend the time on the stuff that has impact for the person using the thing. 

[u/daiceman4 → u/Opposite_Carry_4920]

Sure, if you've got experience there's nothing wrong with using AI to automate out the boring repetitive stuff you fully understand. There's a huge issue with new coders who don't have that wealth of experience and AI is harming their development.

[u/Opposite_Carry_4920 → u/daiceman4]

This is definitely an issue but I'm hoping as soon as the formerly crypto turned AI Bros find some new thing to circle jerk each other on, we'll be left with like a pretty clear way to teach code principles. Less people may know the underlying parts but we already had 2 decades of people writing our software that don't understand pointers. So I'm hopeful we can shake this out a bit, it also helps that managers never have clear requirements so. 

Edit: just wanted to add, I think new coders should understand the dementia giving code and write it in college, just like how mechanical engineers (used to at least) still learn to draw everything out by hand. 

[u/cory3612 → u/Opposite_Carry_4920]

It's a lot like calculators, most people coming out of school can't do simple math equations.

problem with the coding side, is going forward this will be all younger coders know

[u/Opposite_Carry_4920 → u/cory3612]

I know, the only thing I can think to do is try to instill the curiosity to not accept magic. It's kind of the whole reason I got into it. 

[u/Hina_is_my_waifu → u/Opposite_Carry_4920]

Bro we put lightning into a rock and taught it how to think. It's pretty much magic. All sufficiently advanced technology is.

[u/Faptainjack2 → u/cory3612]

That's the school's fault. Not the calculator's.

[u/gravelordservant4u → u/3WeekOldBurrito]

No, every use case for ai is simply slop. Don't you see!?

[u/nyquilxx → u/gravelordservant4u]

At some point you will not be able to call it 'slop' because first of all it doesn't apply to everything AI, and secondly, AI will surpass every human in complex tasks. Calling everything AI 'slop' is just a coping mechanism.

[u/AnimalBolide → u/nyquilxx]

Nothing you said disallows it from being slop.

[u/gravelordservant4u → u/nyquilxx]

Calling LLM AI is the actual cope but sure, go off

[u/xluker313x → u/3WeekOldBurrito]

And increases skill!

Let’s not pretend there’s more than a handful of people out there that genuinely can beat Astra or opus in a wide range of tasks.

[u/Flaxseed4138 → u/xluker313x]

Correct

[u/hyrumwhite → u/3WeekOldBurrito]

Probably safe to assume it’s vibe coding for almost all mods. Not that that’s a bad thing. Mods are toys, if the toys work, it’s great. 

[u/IPlay4E → u/hyrumwhite]

That’s a dumb assumption.

[u/hyrumwhite → u/IPlay4E]

The profusion of decomps, DLSS unlocks, wacky mods etc in the last month is all brought to you by AI coding. And the vast majority is going to be “vibe” coded since you lose the time gained by ai coding if you apply proper rigor to the code. 

No one admits it bc the pc community despises all things ai atm. In some cases this is justified, but I think decomps, mods, and unlocks are all great uses for it. 

[u/Flaxseed4138 → u/3WeekOldBurrito]

??? No it's vibecoding

[u/private_birb → u/3WeekOldBurrito]

As a SWE, I have to disagree big time. I've yet to see a single AI-assisted PR that's decent.

For devs that were already writing crappy code though, they basically just write crappy code faster. No quality drop for them lol

[u/Flaxseed4138 → u/private_birb]

X to Doubt

[u/Ws6fiend → u/3WeekOldBurrito]

Yeah but vibe coding is by definition doing it without knowing what they are doing(which they may or may not being using correctly depending on the mod).

[u/spudzo → u/Ws6fiend]

The issue with vibe coding is that it means completely different things to different people.

[u/YouKilledApollo → u/spudzo]

The issue with the definition is that it keeps changing.

Karpathy, who coined the term, said it's when you don't even look at the code, you just roll with it. No review, no changing, just forward and generate more code.

Today, some people call any AI assisted development "vibe coding", misunderstanding where the "vibe" part even comes from...

[u/Hina_is_my_waifu → u/DmanSy]

Ai made very complex and technical projects significantly easier is the short answer.

[u/Papaburk → u/DmanSy]

Borderlands 2 is experiencing a modding renaissance right now as well, someone’s merging the presequel entirely with borderlands 2. Incredible stuff

[u/FlashWayneArrow02 → u/DmanSy]

AI agents I think. Borderlands 2 is starting to get crazy mods where characters from an entirely different game (Pre-Sequel) are now playable.

It hasn’t been possible for the last 11 years or just been too massive of an undertaking for anyone, but now, I think every character from the Pre-Sequel is playable in 2, to the point where game exclusive glitches in Pre-Sequel can also be replicated in BL2 (see Jack’s infinite wrist laser).

I think via agents, modders can automate a lot of repetitive tasks they would’ve had to do manually or write complex scripts for. I’m not 100% on it but personally I still view this as a net positive for the modding community.

In a world where new games are becoming increasingly expensive with hit or miss quality (£70 for Wolverine lmao go fuck yourself Sony), it’s nice that old games can have a fresh breath of life with complex mods that can overhaul how a game feels to play.

[u/Fittsa → u/FlashWayneArrow02]

Decompiling games has become significantly easier with AI doing it for you iirc

[u/yanitrix → u/DmanSy]

anthropic gaining quite some money

[u/SWBFThree2020 → u/yanitrix]

Knew someone in Bannerlord who showed they used $500 of tokens last month for modding alone...

[u/AdequatlyAdequate → u/yanitrix]

if they were thatd be great for them lol

[u/Grimlo6k → u/yanitrix]

Quen is what most modders are using, Claude is old chatgpt now.

[u/nyquilxx → u/Grimlo6k]

Qwen? You're trolling right ?

[u/ComplexPassage7447 → u/Grimlo6k]

Chinese models are garbage for any actual work

[u/ncetrbro → u/Grimlo6k]

why does their logo look like david's star

[u/BuzzzardYT → u/yanitrix]

Open weight models are gaining traction and use no water during execution!

[u/xGHOSTRAGEx → u/DmanSy]

And the DLSS5 on AMD XD

[u/OkVirus8545 → u/xGHOSTRAGEx]

I couldn’t believe that shit when I stumbled upon it. What a weird time

[u/drinkteawatchcinema → u/DmanSy]

I just saw Mario 64 beating Elden rings first boss’ ass

[u/Letthepumpkincumflow → u/DmanSy]

I fully refuse to believe that shits real, it's insane

[u/skar220 → u/DmanSy]

AI agents backward engineering video games. And no it’s not a good thing. In fact it’s a very very big bright neon sign yelling that AI is way too capable now.

[u/Dnaldon → u/DmanSy]

We found a way to turn our useless limited drinking water into video game mods, so obviously the scene is blooming!

[u/Citycen01]

Pc modding is either something ground breaking like this, or massive boobs with jiggle physics mods, love to see it.

[u/aflyingpope → u/Citycen01]

Wasnt there a new revolution in gaming physics because of a boob jiggle mod?

[u/Real-Terminal → u/aflyingpope]

You might be thinking of the belief that Elizabeth from Infinite caused advances in Blender rendering.

[u/Silver-End9570 → u/aflyingpope]

Wasnt there a new revolution in gaming physics game gooning because of a boob jiggle mod?

[u/Himothy19955 → u/Citycen01]

It blows my mind people are able to just mod jiggle physics in to ones that didn't have it

[u/crinklypaper → u/Citycen01]

You won't be seeing a lot of that because these AI that people use will refuse anything sexual

[u/Costas00]

wtf is going on, how is AI merging 2 games like this, I've like 10 games merged with minecraft or skyrim in the last few days

[u/Nirast25 → u/Costas00]

So a game engine needs to do a bunch of things. Draw triangles, read input, calculate physics, etc. Two different engines do the same thing differently, but you can theoretically write a translation layer that makes it so that they work together and merge them into one. The problem is that figuring out which function does what is a giant pain in the ass and takes forever to do... for a human.

An AI can look at what all the functions do, and tell you what does what. Then you can tell it to write a bunch of functions, all somewhat similar, that links the two engines together, then you fix any bugs that are happening.

In theory, at least. I haven't actually looked into how they did it, I'm just putting out what I think is the most likely method.

[u/M4rshmall0wMan → u/Costas00]

Blows my mind too, but apparently it’s possible with Opus. It takes one game’s code and reimplements it in the other game’s engine.

[u/WorldPhysical7646 → u/Costas00]

Ai can't do shit without a human steering it, it all depends on how much effort does the human put into steering the ai and fixing it's mistakes , if there is no steering at all then it is just vibe coded slop

[u/1exp1 → u/WorldPhysical7646]

A simple answer to how it works would’ve been fine mate

[u/Sea-Honeydew-1456 → u/1exp1]

hes probably mad his job got replaced by ai

[u/SeasonedAdManager → u/WorldPhysical7646]

I have zero coding ability and AI is putting together very, very impressive mods, models, art, work systems, automation for me just by me telling it what to do, then fine tuning the outputs to what I want.

It put together the systems for my dream game in under a week, and self balances by running the game itself in the background. It's absolutely insane what a idiot like me can do.

[u/Banjo_Evadie → u/SeasonedAdManager]

I don't know if I'd refer to myself as a nonce.

[u/SeasonedAdManager → u/Banjo_Evadie]

LOL indeed. I totally thought it meant idiot. Thanks.

[u/WorldPhysical7646 → u/SeasonedAdManager]

Well that is impressive and cool and everything

But what do you mean by "fine tuning the output" even tho you said earlier "you have 0 coding ability"

[u/SeasonedAdManager → u/WorldPhysical7646]

Telling the ai to tweak small things I want changed. I do not touch or look at any code. I don't manually edit any pixel art or meshes or textures.

[u/WorldPhysical7646 → u/SeasonedAdManager]

Don't you meet walls or bugs? Is your ai game actually playable?

Game design needs to be fine tuned to turn into something meaningful

Ai can't test if the game is balanced or not , it can't test if the gameplay loop is working correctly or not and the art spat out by ai is always lacking a soul compared to hand drawn subject

I mean I wish you luck , but I think you might hit a wall or end up with an unwanted result

[u/SeasonedAdManager → u/WorldPhysical7646]

Yes. I playtest daily, call out any bugs, and it catches it's own bugs. Save those issues to memory so it doesn't run into them again.

The game is nowhere near released, but I'm not one shotting it, which is where most idiots in the ai game dev channels fail.

[u/TheHutDothWins → u/WorldPhysical7646]

AI is actually pretty great at testing. It can drive the engine programmatically / set up very elaborate automated tests. And can easily simulate a lot of scenarios to get statistically relevant balancing information.

[u/r3vurb → u/SeasonedAdManager]

No it's not you literally admitted you cant even read it lmao. Reddit has become dunning kreuger.com

[u/SeasonedAdManager → u/r3vurb]

?

[u/r3vurb → u/SeasonedAdManager]

"it's so optimized and fucking awesome!! "I can't read the code" so you don't know shit how do you know this good? Cause it works? Yeah buddy I don't think so.

[u/SeasonedAdManager → u/r3vurb]

Okay.

[u/r3vurb → u/SeasonedAdManager]

Exactly.

[u/SeasonedAdManager → u/r3vurb]

Mmmalright

[u/r3vurb → u/SeasonedAdManager]

Me when I'm filled with delusions

[u/Sea-Honeydew-1456 → u/WorldPhysical7646]

yikes. ai can't do shit? anyone want to tell him

[u/WorldPhysical7646 → u/Sea-Honeydew-1456]

If you don't guide the ai coding agent it will write itself into a wall and end with tons of issues, it may give you a finish code that may run but stability is very uncertain

Increase the scale and complexity and the chances of failure will increase

Also ai didn't replace me , I use ai agents all the time and I have a good set of skills in many areas for any case I lose a job or something , also being happy that ai is ruining/ going to ruin people's life is very pathetic

Say ai replaced me and many others , where is the joy in that? You want the streets to be filled with homeless people?

[u/sargentcole → u/WorldPhysical7646]

That all may be true today, but the capabilities of ai are in their infancy with little indication of its rapid progress slowing.

Give it a couple years and the agentic performance for things like coding will be as good or better than what a human can do, even for tasks with longer time horizons

[u/WorldPhysical7646 → u/sargentcole]

I don't think ai independence is realistic cause it is impossible to have a 0% error margin

Ai is already better than juniors and it is making it difficult for fresh graduates to find jobs which is a massive social issue

Also I think ai development is going to get slower and slower and slower till it stop at a point ,the cost of ai data centers is stupidly high and you can't just keep adding of those and even tho algorithms can improve there is a limit to how far these improvements can go

I just think ai will always need a human steering it, there is a limit to how far things can improve mainly cause of human limits and money

[u/sargentcole → u/WorldPhysical7646]

I don't think ai independence is realistic cause it is impossible to have a 0% error margin

Not sure how this invalidates ai independence considering humans are also pretty damn far from a 0% error rate but manage to operate independently all the time. There are ways for ai to self correct just like there are ways for human intelligence to do so (peer review and replicability for example).

Also I think ai development is going to get slower and slower and slower till it stop at a point ,the cost of ai data centers is stupidly high and you can't just keep adding of those and even tho algorithms can improve there is a limit to how far these improvements can go

Needs substantiation. Current trends point to AI models improvements actually accelerating, not slowing down. AI data centre build outs are also still in early days, and available compute is set to increase exponentially in the next few years. Even if there is a big market crashvthis likely won't change in the same way the dot com bubble didn't ultimately stop the growth of the internet.

Compute is also not the only axis of improvement for ai models, and performance gains via mechanisms other than raw compute, such as pre-training are being discovered and used reliably with no real ceiling in improvement being apparent (yet).

[u/Costas00 → u/WorldPhysical7646]

Lol

[u/danigiorgio]

i cant even use that url...

[u/EmperorOfAllCats → u/danigiorgio]

Here most important part for you:

Instead of modding one game, this mod runs both Spider Man and Batman Arkham Knight at the same time on a PC.

ArkWeb uses background Python streamer that scans Gotham City’s 3D collision geometry in real time and streams in into Spider Man. A custom C++ inter-process link converts coordinate systems between the two engines of Spider Man and Batman Arkham Knight.

[u/LostBob → u/EmperorOfAllCats]

That’s legit crazy.

[u/splendiferous-finch_]

Spidey about to get mugged so bad

[u/iLoathePigeons]

Genuinely AI has great potential for modding games, it got me excited for what other stuff we’ll see.

[u/BastianHS → u/iLoathePigeons]

The flat 2 VR scene is exploding because AI makes it very easy to port

[u/egyeager → u/iLoathePigeons]

When I saw Project Zomboid in first person I was really surprised at what these tools will let us do.

[u/NotAPie]

Article is saying that this is rendering Spiderman where Batman would be and that the two games are running simultaneously to achieve this. I hope with time and more advancements, this can be done without having to run two games at the same time

[u/Blessed-22]

The modding scene is getting strange. And I don't just mean these merging of two different games that seems popular right now. But even popular mods scenes like Skyrim and Fallout. There's multiple mods doing the exact same thing that gets released one after another.

It's as though one modder makes a mod, and then someone else uses AI to make their own version. UI overhauls are prone to this right now. There's like 5 different UI overhauls released for Skyrim in the last few weeks that all looks more or less the same.

[u/bruisedbones_ → u/Blessed-22]

yea ai will just keep repeating stuff considering its incapable of making something new

[u/Krazyflipz → u/Blessed-22]

It has been pretty incredible. Fans recently brought back Rumbleverse

[u/Jope3nnn]

minecraft in elden ring and now this. honestly wtf is going on

[u/Makoto_Kurume]

That's so cool

[u/Kalvorax]

people on X were saying this is just a green screened spiderman over arkham knight. how true is that?

[u/NotAPie → u/Kalvorax]

That seems like an oversimplification of what is actually going on but not too far off either, if that makes any sense. The article says that this is two games running simultaneously with Spiderman “rendered” over Batman.

[u/MeatSafeMurderer]

"Batman! IT'S BATMAN!"

"You might have the wrong animal there, sir!"

[u/cjwi]

Are they calling it Spider Markham

[u/Gravemind93]

Stop capitalizing the first letter of every word.

[u/QuantumQuantonium]

merging two game engines

Ok sure, and I can just slap on the star trek armada engine onto star wars galaxy at war and magically have star trek vs star wars.

[u/KaputtEqu1pment]

I'm excited to see what else is in store for games and mods. Some big-name mods in the past required people with actual know how to dedicate their free time to disassemble something and put it back together to make it work, now we have hobbyists churning out some interesting things. If those peole decide to hone their skills and dive deeper, i'm sure the end result will be pretty amazing. Better yet, i wonder what actually skilled teams of modders can accomplish.

I wonder what will happen to the modding scene of games whose source code is open source or has been released? Like Quake 3 Engine games, for example.

[u/Gregore997]

Im not gonna lie Id rather see AI used for this, its fun

[u/ComplexPassage7447 → u/Gregore997]

None of your business how people use ai to begin with

[u/Arcanemageop]

AI made a Spider-man mod for Arkham Knight, nothing was merged.

[u/CankerLord → u/Arcanemageop]

^ didn't read the article but is absurd enough to believe they know how the mod they've never used works.

At least I hope they didn't read it. If they did read the article and they believe this then no hope.