No Cats, Dogs Or Humans Were Involved In The Making Of This Game

For almost as long as I've been playing video games there have been programs or utilities or apps that were supposed to help people with few or no programming skills make their own games. Some were fairly successful, opening up whole new sub-genres in which amateur enthusiasts and semi-professional creators marketed and sold their - often generic and frequently quite similar - efforts to each other like stallholders at a craft fair. And then there's Roblox but I think I'll side-step that little landmine.

A few, like The Quill,  Neverwinter Nights 2 or RPG Maker, had entire sub-cultures built around them. Games made using them were released commercially. People made money. But the thing about all of them was that you still had to do a lot of the heavy lifting yourself. 

The pitch of many game-making apps is that you'll be able to make commercial quality games with no technical experience. The implication is that it'll also be easy and require no effort. The first might possibly be true. The second most definitely is not.

I made adventures with both The Quill and NWN2 and it took me weeks of work each time. The utilities did a good job of making the process accessible to a non-coder but there was still a great deal of learning involved even before I got down to the part that really interested me, writing the plot, the descriptions and the dialog.

Now, though, we have the prospect of AI to do it all for us, for real this time. All we'll have to do is tell the AI what we want and it'll give it to us, like when you tell a genie your wish. Except we all know how careful you need to be with those wishes. A genie isn't your friend, it doesn't have your best interests at heart - and it can be a lot harder to put one back in its bottle than it was to let it out.

Here, kitty, kitty, kitty! Now where did those darn cats go?

Never stops anyone trying, though, does it? A lot of heavyweight gaming companies are making all kinds of noises about how generative AI and LLMs are going to make making games easier or faster or more efficient. And more profitable of course. Let's not forget that part.

For the moment, most of them are being cautious about what they say in public. Those with the smarter marketing departments will be aware that even mentioning an interest in AI could cause some potential customers to look elsewhere for their entertainment. 

The acceptable line to take seems to be that AI is just another tool in the box for professional artists, writers and designers, a pitch that has the considerable benefit of following a very well-established historical pattern for new technology, almost every example of which, no matter how reviled when first encountered, ended up being assimilated into the production process and accepted by the audience. 

Unlike any previous technological innovation, though, generative AI appears to have the potential to be considerably more than a tool for creators. Some people, on both sides of the argument, believe it can replace human creativity entirely. 

Enter Bitmagic. Here's the full description from Steam:

"Bitmagic brings 3D game creation to Steam for anyone, whatever language they speak, wherever they are. Creators just type in a description of the game they want to create; and watch it appear before their eyes; no design skills, no coding or technical knowledge required. It’s really that simple.

Bitmagic creates the game concept for you, builds the background story and creates an immersive 3D world around the story. The games are fully playable and easily tunable through the same text prompt."

There's also a disclosure which, judging by the phrasing, appears to have been added at Valve's insistence:

"AI GENERATED CONTENT DISCLOSURE
The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Players can create and modify games using text prompts. The game uses AI (LLM) to understand the player's request and then uses LLM to construct the game using a pre-defined asset library."

Bitmagic is currently available through Steam as a free Playtest although right now you can't just download it and try it out. You have to request access, which just takes a click of a button on the Steam Store page.

At the moment the wait time is minimal. I clicked the button on Thursday and on Friday I got an email telling me I'd been invited to join the test. I was very curious to see how it worked so I installed the client and logged in straight away.

So far I've spent just over half an hour with Bitmagic. I think it's quite unlikely I'll add much to that. I've seen about as much as I need to for now. 

I don't intend to review it. It's on Steam. It's free. If you're curious, go try it for yourself. 

What I am going to do is describe what I saw and what I did and why I was both impressed and disappointed. The game (I'll call it a game for convenience.) runs in Unity and places calls to ChatGPT as required. In less than thirty-five minutes I made two games and played one of them to the finish. I also played one of the three games made by other people, featured on the login screen.

That's a lot to get through in just over half an hour. It suggests that the claim of instant game creation isn't all that much of an exaggeration. And it's not, always assuming the game you want is one where you run around collecting objects by running through them. Both the games I made and the one I played that had been made by someone else had that - and only that - as the gameplay.

The basic process is incredibly simple. You just type something into a text field and wait for about a minute. Then a big window pops up telling you what your game is called and giving you a brief description. Anyone who's ever used ChatGPT will immediately recognize the prose style.

Actual contents may differ.

You can then log in and play your game. You'll get to play as a pre-generated character. At first I assumed that would also be AI-created on the fly but as far as I can tell you just get allocated one of the half- dozen you can see on the Store page. One time I got the woman with the afro, another the green elf. 

The game-worlds looks quite pretty. The controls are simple and they work well. The game gives you a quest or task to do and there's a directional indicator to tell you where to go to do it. Other than that, there's absolutely no explanation of any kind, neither for the game itself nor for the creative mode you can enter to "tune" it.

That was my main complaint: lack of documentation. Other than that, I found the whole thing mildly impressive in that it genuinely does create a complete - if extremely simple - game in seconds. The games it created for me weren't the games I'd asked for but I guess you can't have everything.

For my first game I asked for a game in which a black and white dog caught a ball. I got as game with no dogs, where I ran around finding soccer balls. For my second, I asked for an RPG in which I could play as a cat. I got one where I played as an elf who had to find an Enchanted Moonstone. (Spoiler: I never found it.)

Mono-pups? Make that Zero-pups!

That ought to be where the tuning comes in. You should be able to tweak the game to get it closer to what you're after. And I guess you might be able to do it, if you could figure out how. I couldn't, at least not before I lost interest in trying.

I did manage to make some changes. It's very easy to spawn objects or creatures into the game. I worked that out fast enough. You do really only have to type in a request and the game will make it happen. I asked for a tiger and I got a tiger. I asked for some rabbits and I got some rabbits.

Most impressively, I asked for a sword I could pick up and use and I got one. It appeared on the ground and I was able to click on it and have it appear in my character's hand. So far so cool.

Unfortunately, anything I asked the game to do that involved more than spawning things and picking them up was just ignored, as were some quite specific requests. I asked for "a very large tiger" and got a regular-sized tiger. I asked for "some large rabbits" and got some rabbit-sized rabbits. I asked for a sword I could pick up and use to kill things with and I got a sword I could wave around and have any creature in the world completely ignore. 

My inability to affect the environment wasn't limited to things I'd created, either. One building I went in was full of keys. I could pick the keys up and they went into my inventory. There were chests lying around all over the place outside. I could not find any way to interact with those chests using the keys. Whether they were supposed to or not I have no idea.

Suure... "Very large"...  for a house-cat!

I thought it was possible all these things could be made to work somehow but I couldn't figure out how to do it, so I went looking for instructions. I couldn't find any, not in the game, on the Store Page or on the official website. 

I did find a few videos on YouTube, one of which is by Jani, the CEO of Bitmagic, in which he gives a "Behind-the-scenes Tutorial". That sounded ideal. Unfortunately, about all it showed was how to spawn things then blow them up or knock them down. He also drove around in a jeep and demonstrated how you could change the weather and time of day. I suspect that may be all you can do right now.

Whether you'll ever be able to do anything else is, I guess, the big question. As it stands, Bitmagic could be a fun toy but it's not going to make games for you. Well  it'll make one game that you can fit with different skins and that's barely a game at all. 

As proof of concept, though? Maybe. Bitmagic is getting regular updates so it's worth keeping an eye on. I'd say it would need to be a lot more versatile for to expect much of a take-up but then... Roblox...

Bitmagic wasn't the only AI-related game I played on Steam these last couple of days. This morning I spent almost fifty minutes with a demo called Ale and Tavern: First Pints. I'm not going to review this one, either, although I should stress that it was made by humans - it's not any kind of AI production. 

Bar work? Hard pass.

Except...

The reason I downloaded it and gave it a look was something I saw in a couple of the reviews. The demo has been very well-received. It has Overwhelmingly Positive rating from around seven hundred reviews. One thing a couple of people didn't like, though, was the AI voice acting.

That made me curious. I'm not sure I've heard any AI voice acting in a game yet. I've heard a lot of AI grunting but not proper dialog, spoken aloud. So I installed the demo and played through it to see what that might sound like.

Fine. It sounded fine, although I don't have all that much to go on.  I didn't play the demo all the way to the end (It's really not my kind of game.) but in the three-quarters of an hour I spent with it I only heard two characters speak; the PC and a Merchant. 

The Merchant did have a fair amount to say and my character answered him a few times so I think got to hear enough to say that I have no idea how anyone knew it was AI-generated speech to begin with, if it even is. I can't see anywhere it says so other than in those reviews and had the idea not been put into my mind, I can't imagine it would ever have occured to me. 

What's more, although the performance seemed a bit exaggerated and actorly, I thought it generally sounded better than most voice acting in games like this. All the stresses came in the right place and all the line readings felt right, which is certainly above par. Plus the spoken and written dialog matched exactly for a change.

Kinda hard to take a screenshot of what something sounds like.

If this is the standard of AI voice in games, I wouldn't imagine most players would even notice. I certainly wouldn't. It's a tad bland, sure, but there's nothing unusual about that. I've heard plenty worse. In fact, it's exactly the kind of voice-work I wouldn't normally comment on. It's not very immersive or convincing but it certainly wouldn't put me off playing.

The more I think about it, the less convinced I am it even is AI. and that's the fear, isn't it? If players can't tell if something's been put into the game by a human or an AI, are they going to care? At that point it becomes an ethical issue and gamers and ethics haven't always - or often - been bedfellows. 

It's a problem that's only going to become more difficult as the technology improves. It reminds me of the ridiculous news stories that turned up in my feeds after Dua Lipa's headlining performance at Glastonbury last weekend, when people took to social media to rant about her performance not being "real" because she was too good. 

Apparently she sounded so perfect she had to be faking. Of course, she wasn't but if people can't even tell the difference between a real person singing live and a recording, what are the chances of them spotting an AI talking in a video game?

The game may not be so great but the view's pretty good.

As for the companies that make the games it will, as always, come down to the bottom line. If it makes more money they'll do it. They may learn to be a bit cannier about how they do it but they'll do it, alright.

One thing I think we can count on: no matter how good the tech gets, we won't be making our own games at the click of a mouse any time soon. That would be like giving away the farm. At best we might get something that lets us play at making games but I wouldn't even count on that. 

I'd lay odds that if any full-feature AI game-making apps do eventually appear, it'll be still down to us to do most of the creative work, making it a niche product for hobbyists like all the rest. Anything that's genuinely able to churn out commercial quality games at the touch of a button is going to be locked up safely in a warehouse somewhere and never seen again. 

It's one thing to have AI replace your workers but you don't want it to replace the whole damn business! Then where would your bonuses come from?

Three AIs I Use A Lot, Two I Soon Will and One I'll Be Staying The Hell Away From...

As of today, I count more than twenty apps or websites, bookmarked in my AI Tools folder. It feels like I'm adding more every day. 

Most, I treat as toys. Get them out occasionally. Play with them. Put them back. Forget about them for weeks. Others, I use more constructively but also situationally, only when I have something specific I need to do.

There are three that I use regularly, by which I mean just about every day. I'm beginning to lean on all of them, more and more, just to get the posts out.

They are:

Snapedit  

Tipa put me onto this one a few months back and I've come to rely on it heavily. It solves so many problems and saves me so much time. Tough to recall how I got along without it. 

Snapedit gets rid of the stuff you don't want in the picture. You can upload any image and with a few quick sweeps of the mouse erase just about anything that doesn't fit. So far, so Photoshop. Not that I can afford Photoshop but I'm sure there's some free knock-off I could use. If could be bothered to look, which so far I never have. 

That's not the good part, though. The good part is that Snapedit uses AI to fill in the gaps with something that looks right. Right, not perfect. I'm sure no professional commercial artist would want to put their name to it but it's very much good enough for a blog post. 

The huge advantage I see, the reason I use it almost every day, is that I don't have to worry about taking screenshots with the UI on show. I also don't have to pay so much attention to other players or NPCs wandering into shot with their dumb names and guild tags cluttering up the scene. I can just wipe them out with Snapedit.

It must have saved me literally hours already. What with Snapedit and all the post-processing I do in Paint.net, few screenshots I use these days bear close comparison with the originals, let alone the game. Authenticity is so last decade.

Stable Diffusion  (Hugging Face version) 

My current favorite text-to-image generator. There are so many. I used to use Craiyon, which runs off the old Dall-E Mini, but the results, while amusing, weren't always practical. For a while I used the regular Stable Diffusion. It was fine but then it morphed into DreamStudio and that wants money.

Fortunately, there's still an unrestricted version of the original Stable Diffusion 2.1 build running under the rubric of Hugging Face, an open source platform, whose mission is to "Build, train and deploy state of the art models powered by the reference open source in machine learning." Snappy. That's what I'm using to produce most of the AI-generated images you see in posts here nowadays.

I like Stable Diffusion mostly because it's simple, fast and gives reliably accurate results. In sets of four big pictures. I can usually get at least one I like on the first or second try. They fit very nicely on the blog without much editing. The AI is responsive to prompts on style, reliably returning 50s magazine illustrations or 70s comic book art without needing a lot of tweaks or instruction.

It has the most minimal of interfaces. All you do is type a sentence or a phrase. You can also add a negative instruction to avoid results you don't want. There's an "Advanced" toggle but all that gets you is a slider that affects the Guidance Scale, the degree to which the AI follows the prompt. I generally leave that where it is.

Best of all, it's completely free for unrestricted use. Can't ask for more.

Bard

Bard is Google's chatbot. It's one of the Big Three, the others being ChatGPT+ and Microsoft's Bing. Of the three, I strongly prefer Bard, even though ChatGPT+ is definitely more versatile and Bing probably more accurate. 

The increasingly noticeable issue with ChatGpt+ is that it was trained exclusively on a data set that was gathered prior to September 2021. It's never been updated. Since most of what I want to ask relates to current events, that makes it fairly useless and getting more so by the day. 

I would always go to ChatGPT+ first for AI-generated fiction. I think it does a more creative job making stuff up than the others. Fiction is rarely what I need for the blog, though. 

Usually I want a precis of some news item or story to save time paging through multiple web pages. Bing can bring the data and quote the source but it seems to me to be nothing more than a minimally-enhanced search engine. An enhanced version of a search engine I would never normally use, at that. If I wanted to click on links and read primary sources I'd stick to Google Search.

Bard is a lot closer to the kind of AI-driven research assistant I'm looking for. It's chatty and friendly and communicates in reasonably demotic English. It offers opinions and suggestions, which I find both amusing and helpful. Bard also likes the sound of its own voice and never stints on the quantity, whereas Bing always acts like it's got better things to do with its time than chat and has to pay for every word out of its lunch money.

I can often quote whole paragraphs from Bard verbatim, although so far I've stopped short of just dropping one in and pretending I wrote it. That day is coming though, count on it, if only so I can see if anyone notices and calls me out.

The problem with using Bard as a research assistant - and it's a very big problem indeed - is that when it doesn't know something it's more than happy to make it up. Worse still, when challenged it's most likely to double down and insist it's right, trash-talking anyone that claims otherwise.

In this way I suspect its even more like an actual research assistant - some slacker with a know-nothing boss who can't tell and wouldn't care anyway. But I can tell. Every time Bard tells me something I don't already know, I go check with Bard's prissy elder sibling, Google. 

Still makes using Bard much quicker than going to Google right off the bat. Mostly, when I ask Bard to give me chapter and verse on something, it's because I already know most of the details. I just want them laid out neatly for me. Bard is good at that. It just needs watching. Closely.

Those are the three AI services I rely on but more are coming on stream every day. Here come two more I plan on using pretty often in days and weeks to come - and one I don't plan on using at all.

NightCafe

I can't remember how I came across NightCafe, even though it can only have been a few days ago. Insert Ferris Bueller quote here. It's yet another text-to-image generator but one that comes with a wide array of ready-to-use filters, everything from anime to neo-impressionism. Handy timesaver but more important is the way NightCafe allows you to produce linked sequences of images, each new one iterating on the last. 

Very useful for making slideshow videos but also for illustrating blog posts on a theme. I expect to be using this one often although how often depends on how many free Credits I can snag. 

The payment system operates on tokens, boringly called Credits. The number of iterations you can generate costs a set number of tokens. A single image is free but multiple iterations cost .25 of a credit each. The stages available are 4, 9 or 16.

You can buy credits either in packs or through a variety of monthly subscriptions but you can also earn them for free by doing various things that feel eerily similar to dailies in an mmorpg. Without doing anything much at all, I managed to generate more than enough credits for the images I needed yesterday and right now I have eighteen and a half credits left. Where the half came from I have no idea.

If I can keep myself supplied with enough free credits I'll be visiting the NightCafe often. 

Uncrop

I found this one yesterday, when I was looking for an image generator that could output results in landscape format. All the text-to-image generators I've tried like either square or grid or portrait format, none of which is ideal.

I wasn't having much luck finding one. Googling "Text-to-image generators - landscape format" mostly gets links to apps that generate landscapes. As I was going through the possibles I chanced upon Uncrop, which kinda-sorta solved my immediate issue even though it didn't match the search terms at all.

Uncrop is a new app from Clipdrop. Clipdrop is a more sophisticated Snapedit. it runs on Windows, Android and iOS. It has a free version but you have to take a watermark, which pretty much makes it useless for the intended purpose, I'd say.

Uncrop, for the moment at least, comes free with no watermark. You need to register an email address to get more than a few turns but I did all of this post with it and it hasn't asked me for money yet. It's an "Aspect Ratio Editor". Allegedly "The Ultimate Aspect Ratio Editor". I wouldn't know. It's the only Aspect Ratio Editor I've ever seen.

The website says it can "change the ratio of any image by creating an expanded background to complement any existing photo or image". Sounds fancy. What it actually does is use Stable Diffusion to generate supposedly suitable images to fill the extra space created when you specify a different size of canvas.

I think the idea is to make the end result look like a single, seamless whole. Mostly it works although it has a habit of throwing in completely off-topic elements, like the leaping duck and friends in the picture above. Sometimes it just adds panels on either side of the original to create a tryptych. Whatever it does, for my purposes the results I'm getting are absolutely fine.

And finally, one I almost feel guilty mentioning. Do not take this as any kind of recommendation. It's more of a warning as well as a foretaste of things to come. 

Paraphrasingtool

This is far and away the dodgiest suite of tools I've found so far. It's obviously meant for academic and professional use, by which I mean students who don't want to write their own essays and journalists who don't want to write their own copy. And bloggers, too, obviously.

It's priced accordingly but there's a free option. You get 20,000 characters free but it doesn't say if that's a one-off deal or if it's 20k every so many hours, days, weeks or months. That's for the main function, paraphrasing. There are lots of specialised subfunctions, too, some of which cost, some of which come free.

There wouldn't seem to be any immediate reason to use this set-up over ChatGPT+ or Bard, both of which are perfectly capable of banging out a thousand words of artless twaddle on any topic you care to give them, except that the awkwardly-named Paraphrasingtool (It really needs to paraphrase itself.) comes with a bunch of presets that save you the trouble of laying out your terms of reference beforehand.

I was there because I'd googled "AI Podcast Generators" and I'd done that because I'd seen an article suggesting there was about to be a glut of podcasts written and voiced by AIs and I wanted to see if I could get in on the act. I haven't found an app yet that claims to be able to do the whole thing - produce a fully-voiced podcast from a single line of text - but I've gotten it down to two stages, of which this is the first.

I got PPT's (Not typing that stupid name out every time.) Podcast Script Generator to write me the script for a podcast on SW:TOR's move to Broadsword. Then I had Elevenlabs voice it for me. 

The script was dull and factually inaccurate but so are most podcasts. It was at least formatted correctly and useable straight out of the box, provided you didn't expect anyone to enjoy listening to it. It was also about three times too long for Elevenlabs free service so the audiofile I made cuts off in the middle of a sentence. It's a blessed relief.

I could have cut and pasted and edited my way to a complete and finished version but why would I? No-one would ever listen to it, not even me. The point was to prove concept and the truncated version did that just fine. Here it is on my YouTube channel. I don't recommend listening to it out of anything other than curiosity.

 

PPT has presets for all kinds of short-form writing, from poetry to cover letters. It can offer you Blog Ideas and Blog Outlines and even a Blog Generator. All of them are free. I haven't tried any. I don't plan on trying any. If I ever do try any, I won't be talking about it.

Curiously, there are also presets both for detecting content written by AIs and for bypassing other apps designed to do the same. Got you covered going both ways, there. I can imagine either of those getting plenty of use as the AI wars heat up.

Which they undoubtedly will. These are just the opening skirmishes. This isn't the mythical metaverse or numbskull NFTs or crappy crypto we're talking about. AI's not going to be forgotten in a week or two, when the next dumb idea shows up. 

No, this is the actual future, like it or not and we're all going to need a good set of tools if we're going help build it - or hide from it. These are just a few of mine. Happy to share!

And I'm always looking to add some more, so if you find any good ones, don't keep them to yourselves.

Futureproof Your Mind

It's just as well we didn't have the kind of technology we have now when I was in my teens and twenties. I'd never have left the house. Then again, think of the effect it would have had on my creativity.

As I've mentioned many times, I devoted a goodly proportion of my time in my twenties and thirties to what I consider to be the analog ancestor of blogging - Amateur Press Associations aka APAs. I was thinking about it only last week, when a few people were writing about the decline of blogging and the way their numbers have fallen over the years.

It seems to be widely agreed that fifty readers isn't a whole lot. Even a hundred. I guess it's not, when you stack it against a few hundred followers on Twitter or a few thousand on YouTube, let alone a million on Twitch. 

I don't know how many regular readers I get at Inventory Full. I just know it has to be more than I got when I was a long-standing member of the British Amateur Press Association aka BAPA. 

Membership throughout my time there was pegged at thirty. Occasionally there was a waitlist. 

Publication was bi-monthly and required a minimum of two sides of A4 but most people produced far more than that. There was, oddly, no limit on how many zines a member submitted per mailing and several people, including myself, had more than one title running simultaneously, just as some people these days have multiple blogs.

Designing, writing, laying out and pasting up my zines took me days. They were as heavily illustrated as my blog posts are now. 

A lot of BAPAns were artists, it being primarily a comics apa by the time I joined. Some of them were professionals. I can't draw and in that company I wasn't going to pretend I could. I worked almost entirely with found material, mainly movie stills cut from magazines and illustrations photocopied from odd books I came across here and there. 

Sometimes I'd use photographs I'd taken. As time went on I became more adventurous, experimenting with collage and cut-ups or distorting and distressing the images I used.

As for the writing, I used a mix of handwritten pieces and stuff I typed up at home on my Amiga or an
old portable typewriter. Later I used to write and print a lot of my copy at work. I had a job then where I could do that. It looked like I was busy and no-one ever asked with what. 

Before I had that job, I'd paste it all up at home then take it to a copy shop and pay for thirty copies. It was expensive. I looked into buying a photocopier of my own. It would have paid for itself in a couple of years but i wasn't confident it would last that long. They go wrong a lot in my experience.

As soon as I realised I could, I started taking my layouts into work and used the copier there. My zines got a lot longer once I didn't have to pay for them.

It was all as much work as it sounds. More, really. I'm underselling just how much time and effort it took. I was consistent, too. I don't think I ever missed a mailing. I kept it up for years, every other month, with an annual trip to London for the General Meeting. All of that for an audience of twenty-nine people.

Tell that to kids today and they wouldn't believe you. Bloggers? Don't know they're born!

With that perspective,the kind of readership figures people throw around now seem pretty decent to me. I'm comfortably certain I have at least twice as many regular readers now as I had then, plus an unknown number of casual visitors. It's a huge upgrade.

What's more, it's so much easier. No scissors, no SprayMount, no cameras or clip-files. No photocopiers, no staplers! All I have to do is sit at my desk and wiggle my mouse and I get more done every week than I did in those two months.

I have a huge nostalgia for the grainy, black and white aesthetic of the photocopy era but would I ever have chosen it over the full-color, sound and motion, content-rich creative platforms we have now. I doubt it.

Imagine me, writing one of my many lists back in the eighties. My thirty favorite film stars, say. I'd be going through all my Empire magazines, trying to bring myself to to cut them up before deciding I couldn't make myself do it. I'd be dropping into the Watershed Arts Center and the Arnolfini Gallery to pocket handfuls of their monthly guides so I could cut those up instead. I'd have glue on my fingers and bits of paper all over the floor.

These days I wouldn't even have to leave my chair. I wouldn't be limited to stills. I'd embed clips from the movies, trailers, scenes with dialog that I was quoting. Links to the whole goddam movie, even. It would be better. Who'd say it wasn't?

And what about music? I used to write a lot about music but imagine if I'd been able to play my readers the songs instead of just describing how they sounded, show live footage of the bands instead of just talking about the gigs I'd been to.

That's blogging. Is it better? I think so, although it's just as ephemeral. Maybe more so. Still, I can tell you what I would have thought back then. I'd have thought it was The Future. And I'd have been right.

Only now that future's already in the past. Blogging's dead. The new future is vlogging or livestreaming. Definitely podcasting. We're all on TikTok now, although for how long, who can say?

 As Ferris said, life moves pretty fast but not so fast that people won't still quote Ferris Bueller's Day Off to make the point, even though the movie's thirty-six years old. Somehow it's still zeitgeisty enough for a spin-off to get greenlit in 2022. The past is eating the future just like the future eats the past.

Oh but it's fine. The singularity will save us. It's already here, some say.

Now we have it. Artificial intelligence. That's what this post is about. I just don't ever get to the point until at least ten paragraphs in. I imagine you can program an AI textbot to do the same. 

Well, not me. I couldn't. I bet Tipa could, though. Chasing Dings is my go-to now for how this stuff
works. That and AI Weirdness. They're both in my blog roll. Don't miss out.

I won't. I can't get enough of this stuff. I have four AI image generators bookmarked (All the images in this post were made using Midjourney.), I'm registered with a couple of open AI projects and today I started looking into AI music generators. My dream is to get to the point where all I have to do is input some prompts and out comes a finished, illustrated blog post with video and sound. All I'll need to do is edit. If that.

Oh, relax! We're a good ways off, I think. Not so far you can't see it coming over the horizon but far enough to make the mental adjustment before it arrives. 

I'm doing that now. To me it doesn't look like an autofac, spitting out replicants set to destroy human creativity forever. It looks like another opportunity to say what I want to say and have it look how I want it to look. A new, improved version. Again.

The future is coming. Don't get in its way.

Home Is Where The Art Is : EQ2

Takes "chilling by the pool" to a whole new level

 Ardwulf said something today that set me thinking. He pondered whether EQ2 has more content than EVE and wondered whether EVE's player-driven approach gave players more to do than EQ2's "dev-designated tracks". Reflecting on this, it occurred to me that EQ2 has quietly sandboxed itself without anyone really noticing.

 Everquest 2 probably has more content than any other MMO I've ever played. Even if you've played EQ2, though, you might not have spotted it. Like the proverbial iceberg, much is invisible. Unlike the iceberg it's not underwater, although EQ2 does have plenty to see beneath the waves. No, it's behind the doors of all those houses and inns that you scarcely register as you pass by on your way to the bank or the broker or the bell. 

Indoors is outdoors

Housing has been in the game from the start. The picture at the top of my blog is taken from my gnome templar's inn room in Beta back in 2004. Back in those days a single room in an Inn sufficed for most people. Over time, that changed. Probably because housing fell into the purview of EQ2's greatest ever developer, Domino.

Under her stewardship much of the vast variety of existing furnishing was added to the ever-growing range of crafted recipes. So many lovingly designed items that had long been reserved for the sole pleasure of NPCs fell into the eager hands of player-decorators. Even some of the layout tools used by the devs themselves were handed over to players to use.

Freeport as a French boulevard

It didn't stop there. In the way of MMO players everywhere, those obsessive enthusiasts who never fail to find loopholes that devs never imagine, let alone intend, some anarchic genius worked out how to "break out"  of his house to the zone outside. Now you could not only enter your house through a door in the actual zone but with a little shimmy you could slip outside into your own quasi-legal instance and build over the whole of Maj'Dul or Greater Faydark.

Then Smokejumper got in on the act. His theory seemed to be "one house good, ten houses better". Or twenty.

Someone built this from scratch, In a house. Snark has no place here.

It's one thing when you can have just one house per character and that house might have at most five rooms. It's something else entirely when each character can have up to 20 houses chosen from from dozens of different models, from tiny dojos to entire islands or full-size castles. Decorating exploded.

The dentist will see you now

You can't really appreciate just how wide-ranging the possibilities of EQ2 housing are until you see what people have created. One thing the game lacked was an easy way to go on a tour of your server's stately homes. The recent addition of a housing leaderboard, despite some appalling conceptual and philosophical flaws, at least fixed that. You can now pop into a large number of listed properties on a whim from wherever you happen to be standing.

EQ2 already has by far the most extensive options for architectural creativity of any Western "theme park" MMO. Yet when the forthcoming expansion arrives there will be more. You won't just be able to design and decorate houses. You'll be able to build dungeons too. And adventure in them. It may not have the economic or espionage potential of EVE but EQ2 has an awful lot more to offer than on-rails questing and dance-card raids.