Posted by vuciv 3 days ago
I was intrigued as to how it would intercept a conversation and then pause the game for long enough for the LLM to return a response, so I used https://gitingest.com/vuciv/animal-crossing-llm-mod to dump the 40,000 tokens into Claude Opus 4.1 and asked it: https://claude.ai/share/66c52dc8-9ebd-4db7-8159-8f694e06b381
The trick is the watch_dialogue() function which polls every 0.1 seconds and then answers with placeholder text: https://github.com/vuciv/animal-crossing-llm-mod/blob/cc9b6b...
loading_text = ".<Pause [0A]>.<Pause [0A]>.<Pause [0A]><Press A><Clear Text>"
write_dialogue_to_address(loading_text, addr)
It went like "how amazing is it that God gave us brains that can build such amazing things".
This is what you sound like.
> "Stay normal unless prompted. Avoid overt references to debt unless it comes up naturally."
all the way to:
> "Openly agitate for change. Use fiery language (still PG) and talk about reclaiming fairness from Nook's shop and loans."
Source: https://github.com/vuciv/animal-crossing-llm-mod/blob/cc9b6b...
Can they?
And if you're a stickler for pissing Nintendo off in very specific ways, LayeredFS + Atmosphere opens up some modding opportunities right on the console itself. Not sure how easy it would be to pull something like this off though...
It's not so much a condemnation of HN, but the way IP is in the US. The only website I want hosting my comments on Nintendo modding is my own.
The only thing this kind of censoring does is countering basic censor bots I think, and somehow making swear words publishable in the US.
Until I typed this, I guess...
That modder who had to pay 2M sold drm circumvention kits for the Switch. That's a pretty clear case.
You pretending that saying "emulator" on a forum qualifies just makes you a extra special snowflake.
Says the person going out of their way to attack another person over a single-character asterisk substitution.
Seems fairly understandable to not want to piss off rabid lawyers, however remote the chances of angering them may be.
Also fairly common on Reddit and Discord for communities to ban discussions of them, or even falsely claim they're blanket illegal outright.
There could probably be cool uses but I don't think it will be a pure "upgrade" as the repeating dialog is kind of a feature honestly.
We'll have to see how it pans out xD
Current video games are designed around streamlining content. As a player, your job is to extract all content from an area before going to the next. That's why most areas are designed as linear corridors so that there is a straightforward progression, and most NPCs interactions are meant to offer something meaningful so as to not waste the player's time.
But imagine if interaction with NPCs wasn't just a content delivery mechanism, but instead could sometimes be rewarding, sometimes useless, dynamically adjusted in how you interact with the world in non-predictable ways.
The player would just waste their time in their usual approach of canvasing each new area, which would become unsustainable. There would be no reliable way of ensuring you've extracted all the content. All he/she could do is roam around more naturally, hoping the glimpses they catch are engaging and interesting enough.
Maybe a new player skill would be to be able to identify the genuine threads of exciting content, be it designed or emergent, within the noise of an AI-generated world.
Realistically though, how do you build an exciting player experience with this framework? A starting point might be to approach it as something more akin to LARP or improvisation theater, you'd give each NPC and player a role they need to fulfill. Whether players actually enjoy this is another thing entirely.
That’s a slot machine, and the same mechanism which also gets us hooked on social media. Sounds like something which would immediately be exploited by vapid addiction-as-a-feature games à la FarmVille.
> The player would just waste their time in their usual approach of canvasing each new area, which would become unsustainable. There would be no reliable way of ensuring you've extracted all the content.
Sounds frustrating. Ultimately games should be rewarding and fun. Constraints are a feature.
> All he/she could do is roam around more naturally, hoping the glimpses they catch are engaging and interesting enough.
Good reminder to go take a walk outside. Take a train to somewhere we haven’t been. Pick a road we’ve never crossed. We don’t even need a mini map, and sucks that we don’t have teleportation back to base, but we do have a special device which always points the way back.
> Realistically though, how do you build an exciting player experience with this framework? (…) Whether players actually enjoy this is another thing entirely.
Agreed. Though not enjoying it and abandoning it is fine, I’m more worried about people not enjoying it but feeling unable to quit (which already happens today, but I think the proposed system would make it worse).
But even for story-driven games, you can signal when you're "done" extracting story-related details in various ways, by e.g. prompt the NPC to include dialogue element A,B,C when it fits the conversation, keep track of which were output (you can make it output a marker to ensure it's easy to track even if the dialogue element has been worded differently), and have it get annoyed and tell you it doesn't have more to tell you or similar as the repetition adds up.
That seems a bit like deck-chairs on the Titanic. The hard part isn't icon design, the hard part is (A) ensuring a clear list exists of what the NPC is supposed to ensure the user knows and (B) determining whether those goals were received successfully.
For example, imagine a mystery/puzzle game where the NPC needs to inform the user of a clue for the next puzzle, but the LLM-layer botches it, either by generating dialogue that phrases it wrong, or by failing to fit it into the first response, so that the user must always do a few "extra" interactions anyway "just in case."
I suppose you could... Feed the output into another document of "Did this NPC answer correctly" and feed it to another LLM... but down that path lies [more] madness.
EDIT: Also, having the LLM botch a clue occasionally could be a feature. E.g. a bumbling character that you might need to "interrogate" a bit before you actually get the clue in a way that makes sense, and can't be sure it's entirely correct. That could make some characters more realistic.
Basically you have your big clever LLM generating the outputs, and then you have your small dumb LLM reading them and going “did I understand that? Did it make sense?” - basically emulating the user before the response actually gets to the user. If it’s good, on it goes to the user, if not, the student queries Einstein with feedback to have another crack.
https://openai.com/index/prover-verifier-games-improve-legib...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNPF9VKmzxw
Mods Name is
I wouldn't ever want a game to use it for the core story writing, because it's pretty important that it is consistent and unable to be derailed. But for less serious NPC interactions or like an RPG scenario it is such a great fit.
I also wouldn't want a single player game to rely on remote inference, because that will get turned off eventually and then your game doesn't work.
(Yes, this is a Paradox callout. Give me less fancy particle effects in Vic3 and use the GPU for computing pop updates faster!)
(Probably the biggest barrier to this is the lack of a convenient C++/C#-level cross-manufacturer compute API. Vulkan is a bit too low-level for game devs to work with, OpenCL kind of sucks, and CUDA is NVIDIA-only.)
I think sandbox games like animal crossing are the exception, if it ever becomes reliable enough to put in anything other than an M rated game.
Animal Crossing, the Sims, Cult of the Lamb, and similar games would infinitely extend the life of the game. But I am sure we can all already imagine the headlines when these "family" games start saying things that they really should not be... especially given recent issues.
For the record, not dismissing the person who did this work. But doing this commercially has its risks.
Another issue would be emphasizing the meaninglessness of the dialogue. For example, playing Trails in the Sky has lots of NPC dialogue that's repetitive, but at least the dialogue is relevant with how the NPC's life progresses in the grander scheme of things, such as having difficulty with her entrance exams, or having an argument with his fiancé. It's not main dialogue but adds flavor for anyone who cares about the world enough to interact with the citizens.
I don't think I'd like to interact with characters that I know whatever it is they have to say is generated on the fly and adds nothing other than random tidbits. The novelty would quickly wear off.
GLaDOS from Portal would offer one player pudding and another one a steak. You get to a wall which says “the ravioli is a fraud” and become utterly confused.
The real immersion breaker and the holy grail of RPG is the fact NPC have no life or goal outside of what the player does. Imagine a game where NPCs have wants and goals and do things to get those done. Where you could leave it running for 10 years and things would have happened without you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpYVyJBmH0g&ab_channel=DougD...
Thankfully, a lot of old games love to use global variables because you can't run out of stack space or allocatable memory. Modern games shy away from that because even the tiniest consoles these days come with gigabytes worth of RAM, even a memory leak has to be a gigantic firehose to bring the system to a halt.
Depending on how well we assume an LLM would do at this task, it’s an interesting way to see what “real people” would think about a very hypothetical situation.
In fact, Nintendo did release an official add-on called the Broadband Adapter, which plugged into the bottom expansion port and provided an Ethernet jack. Only a handful of games supported it, one was Phantasy Star Online. I also used it to stream games/roms from a PC. This worked by exploiting a memory vulnerability in Phantasy Star Online to load arbitrary code over the network, though with slower load times compared to running from disc.
"What About the GameCube Broadband Adapter?
Yes, the GameCube had an official Broadband Adapter (BBA). But Animal Crossing shipped without networking primitives, sockets, or any game-layer protocol to use it. Using the BBA here would have required building a tiny networking stack and patching the game to call it. That means: hooking engine callsites, scheduling async I/O, and handling retries/timeouts, all inside a codebase that never expected the network to exist."