Good to know, but sad that it has to be said.
Ok sure, but how much of the game will actually be generated by dolphins?
This will probably be just another example of HUMAN appropriation when plenty of dolphin developers are struggling to even find work in this industry. Maybe when dolphins are literally the subject matter of the game we could consider inclusivity in its development?
#dolphin_life #Phins_In_Gaming #NotMyEcco
In the original game I’m sure you had to be a dolphin to beat the first level
You know, I recall playing this at a friend’s house decades ago and being totally, utterly, stuck on the first level for like… many hours.
So yeah, you may be right about that.
Was there like, a maze in that level? I think I remember a maze that ultimately led to a smaller area of open water, where you were just like “well fuckin’ now what?”
Look buddy, I don’t give a single fuck about your #EccoFascist bullshit.
#AdolfPhin #PhinLivesMatterToo #NotAllPhins #ReleaseTheEccosteinFiles
Oh come on, I see right through your posturing to be allowed to open an all-dolphin game dev sweat shop. Stop it, it’s a waste of money because the whales always interfere and get the dolphins to unionize after the dolphins earn their programming degrees and then they go out and write emulators (because obviously we just close the shop). One of these days they’ll get in contract with the penguins and might start pumping out Linux distros!
I knew that “No AI used” is going to become a huge selling point for many products. And I think this is just the start.
That’s excellent. And as these mega corps watch consumers favor those products. Maybe, just maybe they’ll fucking implode. That’s just a fantasy I know.
Unfortunately they won’t. They are earning tons of money.
Earningburning. Fixed it for you.
I’m gonna have my kid add “No AI used” to his lemonade stand sign. He’ll probably double his profits.
(so like $4).
I made a post about thia exact thing a couple of weeks ago! I will give my money to people not using ai bullshit, and if theyre liars, they wont see a cent from me again. People need to stand up and have some damn principles about this.
The reality is software engineers will use AI or will find themselves out of work as they won’t have the skills to get hired.
Customers may never know if AI is used as a tool in game creation but it will always be part of any software and development studio.
Using AI for music or design assets is totally different from using it for the code base and blanket statements don’t improve the situation
I disagree with your statement, unfortunately.
I could see a refusal to use codegen as a potential liability, but that’s not “skills”. The biggest thing about codegen is you have to review it and just lower your expectations that the code comes from a technique dumber than the dumbest human intern you have ever seen and approach it with supremely thorough skepticism. It’s exhausting how dumb it can be and how you have to be paranoid for every single piece of output. But it’s not a “skill”
While we don’t do game development, my company has investigated using gen ai for code and we found that it doesn’t reliably assist us in anything other than boilerplate code. I personally found that it hallucinates APIs on the regular which made it a massive waste for me as I basically had to go back and rewrite most of the code myself. Using gen ai for code reminded me of every time I’ve worked at a company that outsourced code; we rarely ever got what we asked for and by the time we got something usable it still wouldn’t be up to our standards, which generally resulted in scrapping what was delivered and having to rewrite the whole thing internally.
Using AI for code requires a high level of specificity, software houses that are getting the most out of it are not using it so much inline or vibe coding because as you say that leads to hallucinations or having to repeat yourself.
The common approach now is to use multiple agents with different responsibilities, the human effectively becomes a team leader and uses one chatbot to orchestrate a plan being very specific about the outcomes and the requirements and breaking the plan down into phases,
Another agent will be used to write the code, they will have set rules files to keep them on guard rails, they will check their work as they go and deliver a pull request at the end of it for the human to check and approve
The next agent will be there to write tests and check the work of the second agent.
It’s a lot more work than writing a single prompt and expecting a good outcome or close approximation, but it is getting better results now.
And what’s funny is we all know they’re going to use it somewhere.
I actually put just a single ai generated pixel in all my games
Now you can’t win some awards…
What if I use DLSS to upscale and add frames?
Maybe the new Ecco game will be optimized well enough to not need or include DLSS and frame generation. 🤷♂️
If they use that stuff and it’s still a 2D platformer, holy fucking shit. 🤣
I need 800fps. One of my Steam games was 800+ fps on its HUD even though it was on a 60fps monitor. My GPU was going at 100%.
The game can run faster than the refresh rate; you just won’t be seeing more frames than 60 a second.
I paid for whole GPU.
DLAA then
Well it wouldn’t be a single pixel then, would it?
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AI is quite bad at pixel art in fact.
It understands things must look roughly made by squares, but it doesn’t understand what pixels are and their fixed grid.
To be fair, humans are also bad at it these days, judging by the amount of mixels.
even if it is exclusively trained on pixel art?
Yep. It will create something that at a glance looks like pixel art, then you zoom in and find anti-aliased rectangular pixels made out of three different shades of the main color, a weird line, and no clear grid.
If you use a pixel art export node in ComfyUI that won’t be a problem. There’s a whole guide about it here:
https://inzaniak.github.io/blog/articles/the-pixel-art-comfyui-workflow-guide.html
A whole song and dance to post-process a broken pixel art image into a fixed grid. I’d rather just have talent or pay a human being that will make art in the first place, thanks.
Also, the example shown would be a terrible image to use as an asset, by the way. It’s a clear example of not pixel art, rather, 2D art forced to be interpolated in a “pixel like” fashion (aka what happens if you do a few nearest neighbor passes and then a fixed grid downsampling)
Note that there’s more than one model to do pixel art and there’s pixel art LoRAs that do a decent job. There’s loads of flexibility when generating this kind of thing.
Also, you can just tell it to generate a thousand over like 10 minutes and pick the best one and use that as a base to improve upon. AI is just a single tool in the workflow.
I also want to point out that not everyone can just pay someone. Don’t be paternalistic: If people want to use AI in their workflow for any reason that’s their concern. To angrily throw your hands in the air and say, “I’m not touching it because AI!” is like giving free money to the big publishers.
You’re setting a completely unnecessary high bar, “you must be this rich to ride.”
I’m not touching it because AI. Thanks.
The person above you is wrong, while a generalist model will struggle to make valid pixel art, either a specially trained model or one with elements to force a specific structure could make generative pixel art.
This seems like a valid example - https://pixel-art.ai/
They can base their pixel art off ai art, that resembles pixel art. Would still count as “no ai in the game” I guess.
I remember getting irrationally pissed off at the genesis version when i was little lol. Great game though.
I’m so fucking pumped for new Ecco games. I loved the original on Genesis and it’s about damn time we get some fresh stuff in the series.
Even better with this statement
I hope they make an effort with the soundtrack. For me that was a big highlight on all games (specially Sega CD).
Undercaves song goes so hard
YESS. I’m super eager to hear the sounds they come up with here.
Genesis music is of its own genre. So good
The Yamaha chip (YM2612) really gave it a super grunge sound, perfect for games like Comix Zone. That said, it still felt at home with new age music like Ecco’s.
The fact that we had a synthesizer playing live music is still mesmerizing me.
Comix Zone
Memory unlocked haha. I could literally smell the static on my old crt monitor when I read that!
It really, really does.
This song (All Good Times, by MelonadeM) isn’t from a game, rather it’s one of the demo songs included with Furnace, a chiptune tracker. And it goes so fucking hard:
Not a single pixel. The code, however…
A new Ecco game?? Yess. Love the genesis versions
Ye i just saw a vid on ecco. Wishlisting fs
Not a single pixel. So they will not generate a single pixel, but multiple pixels?
Found the lawyer.
Ok, that was always allowed!
Thank goodness I was worried the French fever dream of ECCO would be ruined
Annunziata has been talking about a new game for decades. I’m sceptical he’ll produce a single pixel tout court.
I just want him to bring back SmallBall Baseball man
Ok then, that was always allowed.
It’s about saving the planet, I think
The developer – whose credits also include Chakan: The Forever Man, Kolibri, Mr. Bones and Three Dirty Dwarves – has previously been quite vocal about his support of tech such as Web3, AI and LLMs (Large Language Models) in video games.
His LinkedIn profile states that one of his “near-term” goals is to “create an AI system to generate ergodic game content.” His current company, PLAYCHEMY, lists “gamification of AI models, Stable Diffusion, LLM, and NeRF” as some of its primary areas of interest.
Save the planet with ECCO, to kill it everywhere else? It’s just marketing (it’s working though). Wait for the reviews instead.
Instead of, what?
Listening to marketeers do their thing. Have we not learned our lesson yet. They’ll say whatever it is to sell their game.
Let them make it. Let them release it. Find out if it’s something you want to buy. Buy it. “It’s about saving the planet” why would anyone volunteer to carry water for them?
I mean I didn’t buy into hype even when I got the gameboy pocket camera, never have and also never pre-ordered anything. except once, I realise I pre-ordered wow to get it at launch day
“It’s about saving the planet” - KeenFlame.
It isn’t about saving the planet. They never said it was about saving the planet, they don’t think GenAI is destroying the planet (see excerpt) The saving the planet thing came all from you.
It’s about marketing, and it’s working, here you are saying ecco the dolphin is saving the planet. Unless you were telling me the plot of ecco, and yeah I suppose, but that’s a bit out of context. Haven’t bought into the hype? What more hype is there than saving the planet.
What’s the most over hyped game you know? Where were people saying it was saving the planet? Great graphics, incredible gameplay, get to watch an acorn grow into a tree in real time… But saving the planet?!
I think you just don’t get the joke…?
