I hate these stupid gimmicky ai slop video game mash ups. I genuinely do no care for them. Everyone is acting like it’s the coolest shit in the world, it’s a fucking gimmick you laugh at for 5 minutes before moving onto something with equal or less substance. It’s also more justification for ai being pushed into every little fucking thing for no reason.
It's just that Elden Ring is way more popular these days so it would replace it in memes or be something like Gael who is more memed and "reddit chungus".
Yeah, something about it taking a long time to decode and most security methods are based on this type of decoding and "we got the pandora's box and we are holding the lid" or something like that
But aren't all the SM64 game fusion man-made by the fact that the game's code was thoroughly studied and decoded like a lobotomized lab rat?
most security methods are based on this type of decoding
No I saw this YouTube short too and it is just wrong. Most security has absolutely nothing to do with this at all. AI does pose a security threat, but it really has nothing to do with the way these mods were made.
I remember playing a human-made Mario 64 × GTA San Andreas mash up from before the clanker trend started, its crazy how much people can mutate the damn game
It was fun but FYI it was mostly wrong. The security threat that AI poses isn't really illustrated in these mods other than them being impressive coding.
Please stop spreading misinformation, that viral short was totally wrong. Reverse engineering a game has nothing to do with- and can do nothing- to encryption. The thing that actually matters for security. In fact, AI is arguably making software more secure by transitioning legacy systems to more secure standards.
Most of the AI mashups I've seen have been made with games that already have existing modding systems and aren't actually placing one game in the other (most of them are using 2 game instances with some way to communicate between them and the graphics on one game projected onto the skybox of the other).
Sometimes genAI isn't the problem, but rather misinformation/misleading by people like OP because they don't know how the process actually works and the commenters taking everything at face value. Just because a student can use calculators it doesn't mean that addition is obsolete or that a human can't do it, even if it takes slightly more time.
Yeah didnt they need to build a whole system where the two games run at the same time and can pass the information to each other
What the AI is doing is putting the video feeds together i assume
Edit: i stand corected, AI is also doing the bridging. Still, point is you dont just upload elden_ring.zip and smb64.zip to claude and ask "plis merge", this stuff takes time and more than likely a lot of human input and knowlege
I'm pretty sure here AI is in charge of being the "bridge" between the games because of the sheer amount of dumb data to process, which is like what AIs job should be in my opinion
It requires you running both games at the same time, and AI writes 2 mods that indeed work as a “bridge” for a “passthrough” effect, the way it’s working is basically running Elden Ring, deleting the ER character, and while you’re running Mario 64, it’s deleted everything from that game except Mario, adjusting both cameras so they’re effectively the same, and overlaying Mario into ER, the part I don’t yet understand is how it parses combat information across games but that’s more AI magic it’s doing.
From what I’ve gathered it’s actually the lesser of the resource intensive AI usage, it can certainly take a lot of loops but I think other media is still much more draining than just code.
The mod doesn’t need an LLM to run btw. The project is vibe coded, but it runs without burning tokens.
For examplef the guy who made the mod for Minecraft and Skyrim published it on his github and you just need copies of the two games + script extender mod
I think the trick is that the AI is used to create a deterministic structure as opposed to continously operating both games in sync. Like, it creates the API that maps calls from one engine to another.
It basically picks and chooses which parts of the two games running simultaneously merge together (like having the setting and enemies of Dark Souls but running the player as Mario)
An AI likely programmed the bridging software because understanding and correctly handling it manually would be a huge pain, but it's not even required.
At no point is an LLM or whatever else is running to provide the result, it's just normal software like any other.
You are the one being misleading here. Why would you put a human to do it if the "calculator" can do it as well?
The reverse engineering need for this kind of stuff took months, sometimes years now takes days, it makes no sense to ask a human to do it if the calculator takes much shorter.
This comment also explains it well. GenAI is fine, i'm not saying people shouldn't use it in this case, i'm just saying that it's not necessarily the byproduct of genAI and not necessarily hard.
I dislike AI being used for things humans are already capable of and frequently profit from. AI art, AI music, etc. But, to be honest, I’ve never heard of people combining two games down to a level like this. As far as I’m aware, this use of AI isn’t replacing jobs. And, in my opinion, it’s a little more entertaining than “a fucking gimmick you laugh at for five minutes”.
Look I don’t mean to defend the terrifying growth of AI, but you have to admit there are at least some good uses for it.
Like the other person said I can respect you actually having a nuanced take instead of just responding emotionally with anger because you heard "AI" and started frothing at the mouth.
When I see a video like this I'll watch it and move on with my day like any other Youtube short or whatever while I'm sitting on the toilet. It's a fun novelty, it's not meant to be museum art.
And this is exactly why a lot of people are becoming even more worried of ai. Some don’t know how difficult it can be for someone to pull this kind of thing off. Yet for ai all it took is to have it coded over two games and boom, merging complete
It has concerning ramifications for human programmers, also for data security. If it's this easy for AI to completely decode games, then that creates major concerns for data security in general.
Im very much a person who does not like a lot of GenAI
Buuut this inherently, isn't something you can just have AI print out in 2 seconds.
GenAI in coding is something thats arguably an understandable use (if you know what you're doing)
Sure you can have it print out a shit product, but to actually have it create something "good", you'd already need to understand code.
I think its an interesting use case and comes entirely down to how low level you want to get with the decisions. Like undertale could totally be vibecoded (and the code could very well be better) but as long as human decisions are conciously being made and the assets arent ai generated it could come out fine.
Though us being lazy we always want to take shortcuts so idk
only problem is going to be when companies realize AI can technically crack their games and post them online in a couple of hours lol. think about it. how is it that now game cracks release by the hour? fucking AI. AI doesn't need to sleep, or tires, or gets frustrated by DeNuvo, it will try everything in it's path to crack the damn game if you ask it to.
I mean if nothing else it’s kinda fascinating that something like this is even possible, like I assume this is Elden Ring (please correct me if I’m wrong, I haven’t played) and Mario 64, which are about 3 decades apart from each other in release dates and yet here I am watching Mario launch this giant behemoth off a cliff.
I really hope this inspires people to make mods like this without AI someday because this is a nuts concept (to me at least)
It’s theoretically possible to do without ai but the amount of effort , time and therefore money you would need is unfathomable compared to how fast devs can do it with the ai doing the longest and more time consuming part of the work (and we’ll ignore the fact that humans will do a lot of coding mistake that ai won’t do)
Holy slopulist. Let people have fun. Of course you got 1000 up votes already because anti AI people are against all AI so much they won't entertain even a miniscule amount of it being treated like it could be useful/fun.
If your opinion is anti AI in all forms, in the most general way, then you're just a sheep fr.
This is like one of the few use cases AI has. A human would take years of development to do something like this. For better or worse I think LLM type AI is here to stay
Pretty sure a human doing this would take years, that’s why we’re seeing so many now as ai makes it actually doable and not something you dedicate years of your life to
That's why an argument of AI being bad because it produces slop is just not the right approach.
Falls apart when it actually starts getting good eventually.
I don't really have a comparison but it's like arguing against the death penalty on morality alone instead of economics of it being more expensive than life incarceration, people can generally agree on the logic but not subjective shenanigans like these.
I mean when the death penalty is removed, it is normally removed based on the moral grounds argument, but that's aside the point.
There's never been a strong moral argument against using data in AI, just a legal one. Copyrights/patents defend financial interests, for example. Songs are protected by the DMCA, mostly because people generally saw no ethical issue with downloading music without paying to the point that it threatened the music industry.
The slop argument starts falling apart when AI starts producing things humans can't make. AI earned the term slop because the early models produced very poor quality work and couldn't perform even the most basic tasks without glaring errors. As the number of errors dwindles the term has changed from poor quality work to a pejorative made for it's sake because it's just AI.
That's because this is one of the greatest advances in gaming / modding scene ever.
We're able of reading the source code of games, recompile game and change stuff that's hard coded into the game and would've been impossible to ever change.
People who hate on this have no idea how valuable to gaming this actually is and how we've not even tapped it's full potential yet.
The issue is that often this recompilation stuff is straight up just...not good. I' ve lost count of how many recompiled vibe coded stuff is done that is barely better than just emulating stuff.
Something like Sims 3 getting decompiled is a massive treasure trove, due to how it was terribly coded + 32 bit + ugly sims despite sharing the same base as TS Medieval
I mean, sure, a lot of the recompilations are vibe coded, and hence likely unsustainable to maintain
But I'm pretty sure for Mario 64, its a decompliation rather than a recompilation, and also predates the AI-generated ones
For comparison, for Sonic Unleashed, that one is indeed a recompilation rather than decomplication, but a manual one which predates the surge/wave of vibe-coded ones
If AI is able to brute-force reverse engineer an entire video game, then it will soon get to the point where it can brute-force through anything.
Encryption? Well that won’t take long to crack at all. I hope your bank’s software is up to date. But even then, it won’t matter.
We already know AI basically hacked the Australian government. The more that we train AI to break down entire projects down to their source code and recompile things from the ground up, the more capable it becomes of doing serious damage to things that actually matter. I don’t think people realize what this means for the long run.
I mean, I'd also argue that this is only a short term problem that can be resolved using new methodology that AI can't interface with. Of course...timeline of said issues is another question entirely and with how loose AI companies are and the boomer governments of the world doing fuck all to limit it, probably closer to a problem than not.
Out of all the possible cybersec risks to illustrate your point, you picked ENCRYPTION?
You know, the thing where the algorithms used are famously open-sourced as best practice, because obscurity is the lowest form of security and more eyes means more gaps get spotted early?
Yeah this is definitely an interesting step towards things like decompiling games and stuff like that
I hate gen ai as much as the next guy but the ai being used in this kind of stuff is usually run locally so you don't even have the environmental factor to worry about
I think people just see the word ai and get their panties in a twist
I may just be blind. But isn't this just a mod? Mario 64 has been recompiled and has been added to a lot of things. And Dark Souls? (Don't actually know the game) probably has a decent modding scene? Overall it doesn't seem like the hardest thing to make.
I have learned my mistake. Thank you for informing me.
No, it's incredibly difficult to do for a solo developer. You need to find a way to translate collision data between two games on the fly, even if those games work entirely differently. You need to communicate combat, movement, and whatever other feature the game has over to the other as well. These tasks can be handled either meticulously one by one by hand or on the fly by an ai model that can do it much faster. Even with ai, the programmer still needs to do a significant amount of work to actually make it functional. Ai doesn't do all the work, it just does the most mind gratingly long, tedious, and boring step that nobody wants to do.
For me it feels same like when Dalle AI generation just started and all you could see for next 2 months were trail cam images of various pop culture characters looking creepy. Like yeah, it is interesing and funny first 2 times, but it's already getting old
You guys are the biggest buzzkills in the world. AI could literally create the coolest thing in the world that was never possible before and you’d still go “hrm AI slop you should feel bad for enjoying it”
You bring up how neural nets have revolutionized the creation of drugs, genomics, and medical imaging and redditors usually start short circuiting. They can't fathom the notion that AI has legitimate use cases.
also ask them why they hate AI, they'll cite how much power it wastes. while spending 12+ hours a day on multiple screens, constantly supporting companies that waste fuck tons of power unnecessarily.
very very few people actually care lol. most just hate AI because they were told to.
people live in echo chambers. There are things that suck about ai, and things that are insanely cool, but most anti people only know how to be anti something, so the discussion can't even begin to be had. its just all anti arguments.
Doesn't help how easy it is to spread goofy shit on social media of some outdated model giving bad info, and pretending that it is at all representative of the current standard. Not to mention the major labs shooting themselves in the foot by offering up subpar models for free to the general public who already struggles to grasp the basics of what is happening not only when they ask AI something, but when they google something or interact with anything on the internet for that matter.
I think that non-technical people don't understand just how fucking clever it is of a trick. Yes, it uses AI to develop communication layer between the two games because doing it manually would be prohibitely time consuming but it's not like the idea for how to do it was generated by AI or that they require no work or understanding of software architecture.
It's not just copy-pasting assets from game A to game B and then using AI to crudely recreate features of game A in game B's engine, it's running both games at once having the two games communicate with each other in real time. These funny videos are just demonstrations of a concept that has really limitless applications.
yes it looks cool and is time efficient, but it sets a precedent with companies that consumers don’t care if the bones of their game is AI.
the point OP is making with this post is that by accepting these “wacky” ai multiverse mods, we are normalizing vibecoded media, and are intentionally generating more.
with all that said, why would this benefit the top companies? it shows that consumers don’t care about the work put into a project if it doesn’t have that wow factor, we’re gonna see more vibecoded games in the triple A market, and people are going to be laid off.
the point of this thread isn’t “i hate fun” it’s calling out how we’re using ai to take humanity out of the arts and programming is one of them.
yes ai is helpful as a tool, but without proper rules or regulations, there’s going to be more data centers and less jobs for everyone in the workforce, slowly spreading out from the bones of the very product it’s “helping” like the cancer it is.
first they came for the programmers,
and i did not speak out
because i wasn’t a programmer
The resulting games are also just not fun or balanced at all. Like yeah doing 1 or 2 bosses like this could be mindless entertainment for a bit, but it'd quickly wear out when compared to actual mods with actual intent behind them.
You seem to think that people will prefer quality, human made media over AI slop.
But look at social media. Arguably this was our first interaction with AI, the curation systems that decide what we see.
We love garbage, especially when it's tailored to our exact interest. Traditional media CANNOT compete with a system that generate content on demand based on the exact psychological profile of that user at that moment.
It's like the difference between loving a hit song on the radio vs loving a song that your friend made and recorded specifically for you. It doesn't matter that it isn't at the same level of quality because it feels personalized in a way that mass media cannot achieve.
We will drown in our own endless feed of slop just like society has been doing for a decade. Arguably the algorithms are already in control and have reshaped society to be more angry, polarized and lacking incommunication skills. Humans didn't make that choice, the system did.
It's like the difference between loving a hit song on the radio vs loving a song that your friend made and recorded specificallg for you.
This is not a great example. A low quality but heartfelt and custom song from a friend is much more likely to be enjoyed because of the friendship, not the customization.
Dude, first AI came for the chess players. I thought “that’s kinda cool” because I was a kid at the time.
Then AI came for the truck drivers. “Well this is good, reduce roadway fatalities by automating driving”, I said, not sparing a thought for what would happen to the truck drivers.
Then AI came for traditional media. “This is so terrible,” I opined vacuously while downloading a new social media app.
Then AI came for the translators. “Well, I can’t really afford a human translator, and this is so much faster and more convenient, I’m willing to accept a bit of quality loss.”
Then AI came for the college essay ghostwriters. “Maybe they can get jobs as AI trainers”, I shrugged.
Then AI came for customer service jobs. “This is dumb, but what can you do?” I said.
Then AI came for the writers and graphic designers. “Eh.” I kept scrolling past the news on my AI feed.
Then AI came for the programmers. “LOL”, I said. “LMAO, even. Learn to mine coal, nerds.”
Then AI came for the biomedical researchers and mathematicians. “Actually this is good. If AI can do their jobs faster that’s a net benefit for society.”
Then, AI came for ME! An artist! Oh no! This is horrible, I DEMAND everyone start caring! What if -I- lost my job!!! It would be a historical failure for society! Why does no one have empathy for me??? Why won’t people boycott AI to save my job? How dare they! I know, I’ll start harassing people who claim not to care, that’ll show them how right I am to hate AI and that they should too (but only the bad AI that takes my job. I’m STILL fine with all the other kinds of AI that threatened the jobs of you worthless plebs).
AI chess isn't modern "AI" and didn't replace chess players, AI driving is still ass, AI customer service is so hated that the first thing anyone tells it is to let them speak to a human, AI writing/design is still painfully obvious when it's fake, AI math is either an actual calculator or just wrong, etc
“the first they came” was more so a refrence to the poem by niemoller, but I do like the further analysis provided by this comment.
I will say from an artists view it is a shame it took until ai art and music for people to publicly care about ai replacing humans, and yes there is definitely some moral grandstanding happening but I believe seeing it that way is a misreading of my comment.
my main point is that companies and in the worse case governments will rely heavily on these tools instead of real people, centralizing wealth in ai companies instead of dispersing it to real human workers.
maybe saying “taking humanity out of the arts” was a little too vague, as to me art ois anything that humans can study (i.e “the art of the deal” or “the art of war”) it’s the care and thought that makes art, art not just the medium. in a way, everyone’s an artist.
as a tool to help scientists and medical professionals i’ll agree it’s a wonderful tool, but that’s it being in the hands of professionals which is much different than casual use. in my comment i don’t call for the complete abolishment of ai, i said it should be regulated like any new product, because without those regulations, many people who’ve spent years studying and went in to debt for something that used to be an promising career will be turned down and have their spot filled by an ai agent.
actual tl;dr: i agree with you, but what i am saying is that people should open their eyes to the normalization of things like this and start pushing back, not just for artists, not just for programmers, but for all of our financial futures.
okay now this is just ridiculous, not everything you dislike about AI is "slop" and while we're at it i hate that stupid buzzword too. this is something AI is actually fine to use for. it's harming no one unlike Art AI's taking over artist's jobs.
Retro games are the easiest, the AI is making this much easier with modern titles
Where the fuck do you think the decomps came from?
https://github.com/FatalDecomp/ROLLER
My friend and his buddies have spent a few years doing a decomp of Whiplash! Now with multiplayer and custom maps
Do not discredit this shit so easily
Decomps are getting easier by the day
if i remember more accurately, though a bit roughly, all the ai does is run both games at the same time, and has a program to send data from one to the other
Honestly I still just don't believe these are real..like they just dont look real to me, they just look like those sold video edited mashups you would get on YouTube.
They just don't look right, no matter how much anyone says otherwise, it just looks like one game overlayed on the other.
I accept maybe these are real. It's just the weird uncanniness that means my brain isn't computing it. But even if they are real, I am not convinced they will actually be as playable as the footage makes it out to be.
But also just fuck AI, it's not cool, it's a gimmick and if these is real it has some massively concerning ramifications.
according to a few comments i've seen on other posts, that's basically what it is. it's just running two games at once and making what happens in one affect the other.
I find it cool as this is probably every young gamer's fantasy (definitely was mine), but from what I'm hearing about how this all works to begin with, shit like this was just never going to happen unless two games you wanted to mash up gets decompiled some day. And modders simply don't have the an incentive to go through something to tremendously monstrous and it's why AI was used to heavily alleviate that part.
You're definitely not wrong thinking this is a gimmick. You severely break the game's intended experience by adding in elements from other games. But at the same time, I just can't help feel at awe that this is now possible.
I hate what generative AI has done to the creative industry. But honestly it's just hard for me to turn a blind eye and ignore the cool shit it can do when it isn't being used the most asinine purposes.
It isnt even really a "mod", the games themselves are modded, but this is a 3rd party running both games at once and kind of interpolating the interactions between them
It sees Mario on screen, Sees Margit, and takes note that Margit's an enemy. It then uses the logic that Mario defeats enemies by jumping on them, and so when it sees mario jump on Margit, he takes damage
It's just AI layering for the most part. It could be really cool if it was an algorhythm someone made instead of some dude vibecoding it and making an unoptimised mess with AI holding it up
This is significantly less impressive then it injecting Mario 64's code into the rendering and mechanics of elden ring. Still cool though but I thought it actually merged the games
This is hilarious, I love it.
Why are you mad at people for making silly little things they personally enjoy? Why are you getting so triggered by things that have nothing at all to do with you. Yknow you don't have to engage with this shit right?
Imagine being incapable of having any whimsy in your life. You would probably look at some cool like flying cars or robot servents and claim they're "problematic" or something stupid.
Not gonna lie, flying cars would be problematic. Can you imagine modern traffic, but instead of road bound vehicle's it's a small helicopter? It would just be 9/11 after 9/11 outside.
i bet these are the same people that get overly excited about "Panzer / Thomas the Train / Shrek instead of mount/villain"
I get that is cool. I thought, wow, this is interesting when i first saw it. But this becomes so dull so fast. I get it, you stiched MW and minecraft with one new game, yahoo. But this has no substance. Half of them are glitchy and jittery, other half feel just the same.
Sure, they kinda look cool, but...this is just weird? Like, now AI merge video games together? This is hella cool, yea but...having AI somehow do this, is nerve-wracking at least. I'm both positive and kinda negative about this, but at least it looks cool.
I personally have always wanted something like this but....I want people to make it. I c9me from a union family man. This whole a.i. thing, taking credit for doing nothing, its absurd. Its not right.
I just hate gimmicks that lack substance in general (actually I don't hate them, I just dislike them, but I do hate how popular they become)
Like than needle in a hay stack game that got instantly copied with AI multiple times - do you know why it was copied so fast? because it's a gimmick game that has only a gimmick to stand out - but people talk about stuff like this so much, that it's starting to piss me off
From what I remember, they basically just have two games open and constantly send data between the two to achieve this. The two games are basically running over each other.
Now, to my knowledge, this trend of "modding" is actually built on the backs of hardworking Mario 64 modders that put in the real blood, sweat and tears, no AI attached. They've been doing this for years putting Mario 64 in other games--if anyone watches Saltydkdan, I'm pretty sure he had a video messing around with Mario in a Sonic game a year or two back. This basis of Mario 64 modding is probably why this video looks and performs so well when there are representations of the fad that are... let's say, less polished (I've seen Spider-Man poorly superimposed over Arkham Batman, running on the subtitles, not matching the animations of the action going on in the actual game, i.e. doing a backflip kick at something to the right when a guy is getting punched to the left).
Point is, the whole fad is based on something actually cool, and being brute-forced through AI to make something that's visually interesting on the surface level.
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u/ENGINE_YT 12d ago
https://reddit.com/link/pdzm682/video/brx4r8m5pmth1/player