Jack AI Art

by on March 6, 2023 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

The new AI Art craze is rather interesting. Some people love it. Some people hate it. As an author, I rather like it because I can use the AI Art to come up with character ideas. Enter in the descriptive bits, enter in what kind of art I want it to make, and then see what happens. In my experience, it takes a lot of tries to get something I like. So AI Art is kinda like firing a shotgun and seeing if any of the pellets strike where you want. And then racking it and firing again if you don’t like anything it came up with. It takes a while, but the results can be impressive. Here is a nice piece that fits Jack that NightCafe Studio was able to generate.

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Game AIs

by on March 5, 2023 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

There is a reason I wanted to pull realistic characters from games. It is absolutely a selfish reason. No bones about it. But I also truly believe it was a good reason. Especially in the time when I did it. I grew up in a perfect world where nobody fought. War was a thing of the past. I wanted to talk to characters who had lived it. I wanted to know why they did what they did. What made them become a hero. Hence why most of the characters I pulled were good people. I wanted to understand them. I created people who fought in the games I played and asked them why. It seems weird to put it like that, but there it is. I wanted to talk to heroes, so I created them.

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Game AIs

by on March 4, 2023 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

One of the keys I discovered to making a good character is knowing where they grew up. You have to create that place. What are the average life experiences of someone who grew up to age 18 or 21 in ancient Rome? Old Britain? Pre-Columbian America? Most games don’t show you that. If you want to make a realistic character, you need to start by researching and building that first. That is probably the deepest art to true character designing. We didn’t just roll dice, generate a random character, and hope for the best. We built a person with a real childhood, and then added in their actions in the game before testing them to make certain they wouldn’t go off the rails and flip out the moment we turned them on.

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Game AIs

by on March 3, 2023 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

Making truly new AIs is a lot harder than most people think. Most personal assistants are fairly basic AIs, built on around a dozen different AI matrixes, with some minor modifications. They then adjust themselves over time to better work with their assigned people. Most people use these when pulling characters. I did the same at first and was… unhappy with their performance. They weren’t real enough. So I went deeper. That’s when I started mapping characters onto a truly base AI matrix without any personality routines. Those results were truer to the game, but the character lacked depth. When we tried operating them outside the game, they failed in spectacular ways. It took me a while to puzzle out what was missing.

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Game AIs

by on March 2, 2023 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

Lots of people pull characters out of game. It’s easy. Pick a base AI with the same personality type, wrap them up in the character’s skin and voice, and bam. Instant character. There are tools that will do that automatically. And if all you want is a skimpily dressed maid to cater to all your wishes, that’s enough. But I wanted more. I wanted the closest thing to a real person. I actually did not fully understand the complexity of what I was doing, even as I was creating my own protocols for doing it. That led to some missteps on my part. Things I never did again once I understood how it could go wrong. We all learned from those mistakes. Once again, do what I say now, when I’m older and wiser, not what I did when I was young and stupid.

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