Excerpts:
The Verbal Verdict demo drops me into an interrogation room with basic facts about the case to my left, and on the other side of a glass window are three suspects I can call one at a time for questioning. There are no prompts or briefings—I just have to start asking questions, either by typing them or speaking them into a microphone
The responses are mostly natural, and at times add just a bit more information for me to follow up on.
Mostly. Sometimes, the AI goes entirely off the rails and starts typing gibberish
There are, of course, still many limitations to this implementation of an LLM in a game. Kristelijn said that they are using a pretty “censored” model, and also adding their own restrictions, to make sure the LLM doesn’t say anything harmful. It also makes what should be a very small game much larger (the demo is more than 7GB), because it runs the model locally on your machine. Kristelijn said that running the model locally helps Savanna Developments with privacy concerns. If the LLM runs locally it doesn’t have to see or handle what players are typing. And it also is better for game preservation because if the game doesn’t need to connect to an online server it can keep running even if Savanna Developments shuts down.
it’s pretty hard to “write” different voices for them. They all kind of speak similarly. One character in the full version of the game, for example, speaks in short sentences to convey a certain attitude, but that doesn’t come close to the characterization you’d see in a game like L.A. Noire, where character dialogue is meticulously written to convey personality.
NOTE: I just downloaded the game and on my first attempted launch, it complained that the port it wanted was not open. My only option was to close the game. I ran netstat and did not see the port listed, so I tried again. THAT time, it complained about my older video card :-/ The warning is clunky and there’s a typo, too (within -> withing). It says (if I transcribed accurately):
You are using an: NVIDIA GEOFORCE GTX 1080. This video card is currently not recognized withing the recommended specs. We only support a limited amount of NVIDIA GTX graphics cards, all NVIDIA RTX graphics cards or all AMD RX graphics cards since the local AI requires a lot of performance.
So please note that the game might not work properly. Refer to the Steam guide for more information.
When I closed that warning, the game loaded.
Wait… why the heck does it need to open a network port?
Probably or the ai if I should have guessed in the backend it’s using something like local ai, koboldcpp, llamacpp probably
It likely starts the LLM it uses as a service, and it requires running on a port. They could of course have rewritten it to not use a port and instead use other mechanisms possible when you’re in control of the code but then that requires modification of the LLM project they use and would make updating its version harder so such a thing would be reserved for the full release or skipped all together because it’s not really a big deal. All this assuming that they do use one of the hundreds of open source local LLM projects floating around Github.
So laziness. Got it.
(They could easily move to an ipc mechanism that doesn’t require binding a port on a network interface but that’d require time and effort and why bother when the goal is to ship something fast and cheap while the AI hype is strong)
We’re talking about a demo here…
Why do you need to open a port if its listening locally?
Actually it’s not rare that a part of interprocess communication between a software’s processes is done through localhost networking
But what firewall blocks that by default?
Probably none, but I think OP did not say this
OP said that the port wasn’t open, unless they meant the port was already in use rather than the port was closed?
If it runs the model as a service locally, it’s probably communicating to the game via a network port.
Similar to how some single player campaigns are still technically running a “server” for the game, despite being single player.
It is probably easier. I used to run a program that ran its own mini server-like process to send input to other open programs. It used local ports. It didn’t need internet, but it did need ports. My first guess is that programmers already know a bunch of dev libraries that deal with ports so it is easier to use that than write something else from scratch.
I wonder if were gonna start seeing modular specialized game drivers to save space and work.
We already have shared libraries for gamepad controlles and such. Why not one that handles a large language model , one for raytraced light. Maybe even an image generator for patterns in creative building games.
These would need to be standardized and able to be further molded, processed , restricted by the actual games.
Obvious the Triple Ass studios will want you to pay for online services but I legitimately believe there is a future for open source gaming and this could potentially save allot of hair pulling for some nonprofit indie devs.
I’ve played Ace Attorney and the writers put a lot of love and personality into the characters. I’d be sceptical if an AI could get close enough to any kind of writing style to “kill” writing in games like that.
Honestly getting fed up of AI doing a mediocre job of creating art and then people claiming it kills whole industries because it’s the “in” technology.
I know the situation is different for everyone diagnosed with autism, but I like to compare AI writing as being something similar to someone with autism writing (as someone with autism). It can look kinda emotionless and robotic at times but other times it looks passable as something slightly less robotic.
Yeah, the whole study of character is kind of outside the realm of an LLM. They can sort of reguritate, but they don’t think about humans like a humans do, the things we find funny or interesting about eachother, the small nuances that potential reveal a person’s history and internal experience.
An LLM, as sophisticated a piece of technology as it is, cannot really do that like a human writer can. Best it can do is sort of mimic in a limited capacity.
It will kill industries temporarily, until the corpos realize their success came from the artists.
I don’t think we’ll see this any time soon, because corpos probably won’t listen to any creative that presents this, but I want something where the LLM runs locally and is just used to interpret what you are asking for but the dialogue responses are all still written by a writer. Then you can make the user interaction feel more intuitive, but the design of the story and mechanics can just respond to the implied tone, questions, prompts, keywords from the user.
Then you could have a dialogue tree that responds with a nice well constructed narrative, but a user who asked something casually vs accusatory might end up with slightly different information.
Unless you’re willing to put in some kind of response that basically says “I’m not going to respond to that” (and that’s a sure way to break immersion) this is effectively impossible to do well, because the writer has to anticipate every possible thing a player could say and craft a response to it. If you don’t, you’ll end up finding a “nearest fit” that is not at all what the player was trying to say, and the reaction is going to be nonsensical from the player’s perspective
LA Noire is a great example of this, although from the side of the player character: the dialogue was written with the “Doubt” option as “Press” (as in, put pressure on the other party). As a result, a suspect can say something, the player selects “Doubt”, and Phelps goes nuts making wild accusations instead of pointing out an inconsistency.
Except worse, because in this case, the player says something like “Why didn’t you say something to your boss about feeling sick?” and the game interpreted it as “Accuse them of trying to sabotage the business.”
