r/hatethissmug • u/xboxhaslag22 • 12d ago

Gaming These ai video game mash ups

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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.

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u/Frox04IT 12d ago

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 Just because a student can use calculators it doesn't mean that addition is obsolete or that a human can't do it, even if it takes slightly more time.

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u/xXbachkXx 12d ago edited 12d ago

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

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u/Green-Preparation331 12d ago

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

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u/Complete_Resolve_400 12d ago

Yeah from my understanding the ai lets them "talk" to each other, like giving elden ring bosses hitboxes that Mario can read and interact with

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u/DannyLJay 12d ago

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.

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u/VolkiharVanHelsing 12d ago

Isn't this one burning tokens like crazy tho

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u/DannyLJay 12d ago

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.

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u/VolkiharVanHelsing 12d ago

Yeah but it's just for showing off lol

The decompile project isn't as flashy to commonfolk but to anyone who knows even a little bit about coding, it's the most exciting one

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u/Guilty_Rooster_6708 12d ago

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

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u/DannyLJay 12d ago

Oh yeah the same tool can be used to decompile games and share the code! It just seemed that these passthrough mods don’t even require that so it’s certainly the “lazier” thing to be doing with the tokens.

If people started decompiling every game crazy shit could go down. In a fun way.

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u/BerosCerberus 12d ago

Yes. And even there getting help with the code is not a problem. We have some projects that don't want use KI. Acceptable but calling everyone else using KI a disgrace is stupid and shows that even intelligent people are sometimes stupid.

I thinkthe Banjo Recomp has such a text on top. It's a help for people that understand the code anyways nothing else.

I use Codex too. But only for me and somthing that will never see the light of day. But it gave me even more reason to learn how to read and write my own code so I can use it not as - do shit I tell you but understand.

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u/JerzyPopieluszko 12d ago

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.

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u/Isliterally1984 12d ago

Get ready for this to cost like 60 dollars per token once the bubble pops lmfao

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u/Gaelic_Gladiator41 12d ago

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)

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u/Azarjan 12d ago

its crazy how confidently misinformation spreads on reddit like this.

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u/Ahaiund 12d ago

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.

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u/rabouilethefirst 12d ago

Extremely cool and something that likely would be considered too much work to do without AI. People are just angry and bitter for no reason

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u/Frox04IT 12d ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/hatethissmug/s/J9ziSyRdEr

This comment explains it perfectly. We're just building a bridge between 2 or more games, with or without AI. Just like building an app, you can do it with or without AI, it's not that deep

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u/cutcss 12d ago

You people don't know even slightly what you are talking about, I'm a developer and I keep up with all the news about AI, we are less than 3 years aways from Claude being able to responde to "pls merge" giving it elden_ring.zip and smb64.zip and creating a playable game exactly like this, maybe 4 years if thing slow down a bit.

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u/xXbachkXx 12d ago

Im a developer too. In future it will be possible, but point stands that right now i dont think it is possible so i would not call this slop

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u/cutcss 12d ago

"Making something that took years take days for a developer is not slop, it's only when slop when someone who has never touched touched code uses it with the very same objective", that's brain dead stuff, you already drinking from the poisoned fountain, it doesn't matter if you use it as dessert or your main plate. The supplier is the same, the data scrapped (without consent) is the exact same.

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u/xXbachkXx 12d ago

I think we are using different defintion of slop then.

To me slop it not just something done with ai, it is something that is also low quality and took little effort.

If i use AI to remove a background is it slop?

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u/cutcss 12d ago edited 12d ago

"low quality little effort"... 3 years from now AI will do a much better job than this at merging these two games with a single prompt, when that happens are you you gonna claim such output is low quality just because this other one had significant human help ? that's beyond ridiculous. 

About effort, well that's a philosophical talk, given that anyone can claim any amount of effort, like saying they did 90% or they did 10% it doesn't matter, because either way we would have to take their word for it, so effort is and always will be a moot point (unless a way to verify "effort" comes up but I wouldn't hold my breath for that one)

About the question: Yes, removing the background is slop, if you see how it works underneath you realize that it had to redo the full image, that's why sometimes it changes some other things of the image itself when you ask it to "just" remove the background. That mistake like all others is mostly fixed in recent versions, but it's able to do that from doing even more data analysis to be able to accurately create it again, not from doing less, as casual observers might wrongly assume.

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u/xXbachkXx 12d ago

The bg removal tool i self host uses AI to determine what the alpha/mask should be, then applies the mask. No regenerating, its not an img2img im asking to remove the background to.

Still kinda crap so i ended up going back to removing it by hand but thats beside the point

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u/cutcss 12d ago edited 12d ago

And how exactly did it learn to generate that mask, tell me, did it perhaps used hundreds of thousands of images that were created by people that manually removed other backgrounds? But their work doesn't count right? Their work doesn't matter that much right? It's only when it takes enough parts of your job that it starts to really matter and is worth having a discussion about it right?

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u/xXbachkXx 12d ago

I didnt say what im doing is ethical, just that i would not call it slop as that is a specific thing.

Im self hosting a free model (with no telemetry so im not helping them train) so that is minimizing the damage as much as possible, that download of the model is the extent of the damage i caused, not even watching ads and giving them money that way, because of saint adblock.

I was using it for personal projects so im not making money off of it, either. Just saving time. As you see, if not using the model im not paying an expert background artist that would be loosing a customer, im just doing it myself because i know some photoshop.

If you still think it's unethical it's ok, i get where you are coming from so i wont argue with that. Simply to me, slop is mass produced, low effort, low intent and low quality content; and as of right now, this particular project does not seem to fit that criteria in my opinion.

If identifying cancer is not slop and fruit island tiktoks are slop, and sloppiness is a continuous function, then there must be a point in which it starts being slop and i subjectively believe that this game-merge project and adding transparency to images are below that treshold.

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u/cutcss 12d ago

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.

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u/Frox04IT 12d ago

I recommend watching this video to understand how it works, i put it at the right moment for you: https://youtu.be/zRT3MyFwgu0?t=150&si=ICaVijDwOHOUaclE

It's not necessarily reverse engineering or decompiling.

https://www.reddit.com/r/hatethissmug/s/4OXJrP5OrE

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.

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u/cutcss 12d ago

Look my profile pal, I'm a developer, I been for 20 years, I have created mods, from the binary, there is nothing new in that video I didn't know, you absolutely need to reverse engineer a game to be able to mod it, finding the memory addresses of the functions involved in the collision, in the inventory, in any other aspect of the game, all that is a lot of work, its tiresome, but AI doesn't get tired, it can go on and on and on starting and crashing the game, restarting it until it finds the memory address of what it needs, then it can do the same work to identify its arguments (RCD, RDX, R8, R9, all that fun assembly stuff), then it can do the same to translate from one game to the other, because games in different engines use very different scales, some games block the input from ever reaching any other running processes, and on and on and on.

Mario 64, Skyrim and Minecraft are different because a lot of the work has already been done for you, all communities with more than a decade and heavy mod scene obviously have an advantage because these addresses and many other guess work has been done for you, but AI can do it without any of that, AI doesn't need that much existing knowledge about its internals, it excels if its already done, sure, but its not absolutely necessary, and that stuff took months, and now takes days.

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u/Moss_74 12d ago

mother of yap

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u/Frox04IT 12d ago

I understand and recognize your level of expertise. I do agree that you need to reverse engineer/decompile the code of a game in order to modify it or add onto it (mod it). However, it's not always the case for this crossover type of mod (if we can even call it mod at this point). What chasm did is literally creating a bridge between the 2 games running at the same time, he specifies that he's using vanilla Minecraft and vanilla Skyrim. So what we're not agreeing right now is that this process is not actually modding, since it doesn't even need to modify the code of either game. I think you're describing the reimplementation of mechanics from other games into new ones rather than this bridge process, in which case i of course agree that you also need to access the source codes. We basically agree, we were just talking about different things

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u/cutcss 12d ago edited 12d ago

The bridge is a mod on each game, is not a new thing called "bridge" or anything like that, it's just 2 mods talking to each other, and doing that stuff of rendering the specific parts that you want is also quite a lot of work, games don't just have a toggle somewhere where you can just ask minecraft to just stop rendering the terrain.

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u/Isliterally1984 12d ago

If you can’t wait for human passion, you don’t deserve its products.

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u/cutcss 12d ago

That's like saying if you cant wait for someone to use the abacus you don't deserve the calculator, discussing if someone deserves or not a calculator is a total waste of time and besides any practical point

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u/usernamefart69420 11d ago

Do you only eat food if it was harvested with a scythe instead of a combine?

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u/Isliterally1984 11d ago

Not comparable. Did Claude generate that comparison for you?

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u/usernamefart69420 11d ago

No. I wouldn't waste time using AI to fine tune my reply on reddit lol. Why aren't they comparable?

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u/TopazTriad 12d ago

Anything, and I mean anything that is even tangentially related to AI is going to be totally overwhelmed with negativity on Reddit. No one is going to question a claim if that claim gives them an excuse to shit on AI with a cartoonish degree of hatred. They almost always betray themselves as having no earthly clue what they’re talking about.

This is what cell phones were to the old people we grew up with. People who are 25 now will still be acting like this when they’re 80, well past the point when everyone else has adapted.

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u/FTownRoad 12d ago

These are the people that thought PCs wouldn’t change anything either and were just for playing video games.