Thread

What reversing, modernising old games tells us about the economic impact of AI

135 points · 90 comments · keeda

anonymous908213 · 1790653348 · focus · HN ↗
Why do AI boosters always tell blatantly obvious lies? I guess the answer is because lying is rewarded, but then the question is: why does our society reward lying so heavily? Why does HN? You would think HN draws logically-focused, high-information users who enjoy facts. You would think.
Let's take this claim:
> the state of the art on 3d asset generation already changed dramatically. GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6 Sol and finally Claude Opus 5.5 all moved closer into "Senior 3d artist territory"
I opened Codex, gave Astra Max access to Blender and a model, shaders, materials from Persona 5 and confirmed that it could work with it. Then I gave it reference artwork of an unrelated character and prompted it to use the Persona 5 model as a reference and model the new character in that style. The result: <a href="https://d.uguu.se/BOuGsmyR.png" rel="nofollow">https://d.uguu.se/BOuGsmyR.png
Yes, it is nifty a language model can do anything at all with that prompt. But come now. Senior 3D artist. Give me a fucking break. Lie after lie after lie. Do you enjoy the feeling of clout you get from lying and people sharing your fabrications in a panic? Is that it?
I wish we could talk rationally about the capabilities of tools. Public discourse has degraded beyond reason. As one of the apparently extremely tiny minority of people who are grounded in reality, who objectively evaluates claims with their own two eyes, it is not very enjoyable to be bombarded with conversations from and between liars day in and day out. What is the purpose of this liars' society we have built?
1. brookst · 1790653649 · focus · HN ↗
  > Why do AI boosters always tell blatantly obvious lies
  > Public discourse has degraded beyond reason
  I rest your case.
2. gmerc · 1790660532 · focus · HN ↗
  Author here. I’m as far from an AI booster as it gets (look me up) and I worked in the industry for almost 2 decades. I know how assets look like, especially from outsourcers and internal outsourced studios on titles like Assassins Creed.
  I’m telling you Astra+ is massively improved under proper guidance and it’s going to be good enough for 80% of games. Maybe not your GTA, Kojima or Call of Duty but that claim was never made. We have the pipelines of tools to deal with mass produced assets. Especially if you pass reference assets not just pictures which all game studios have aplenty.
  There’s no way to assume the technology, given training data, will not solve this completely either.
  Have a look at myroom.isfine.org - an 1 day experiment with one of said pipelines.
  1. anonymous908213 · 1790669572 · focus · HN ↗
    > know how assets look like, especially from outsourcers
    "I work for AAA studios that are routinely mocked for how low effort their productions are, and I know how cheap we can go" is a very different claim from "senior 3D artist". I don't deny you'll be able to cheapen out more than ever before and produce even sloppier games.
    > Electronic Arts and Ubisoft and led game industry aligned teams at Facebook/Meta
    It's amazing you can boast about your resumé, it's a who's who of deplorables known for shameless moneygrubbing. No wonder you're so enthusiastic at the prospect of replacing quality art with the cheapest slop imaginable.
    > I’m telling you Astra+ is massively improved under proper guidance and it’s going to be good enough for 80% of games.
    You think that model I generated is good enough for 80% of games (note also this is walking back your claim of senior 3D artist)? Let's not be liars. If even a junior artist produced that model, they would be let go immediately. I did also pass a reference asset, you know. If I'm wrong, show me. Not a room full of textured boxes that might as well be a mixup of existing asset packs - show me an actual novel human character model generated from concept artwork references. Your words have zero credibility without proof.
    > There’s no way to assume the technology, given training data, will not solve this completely either.
    This is a religious belief, nothing more. I have been hearing this every day for the past several years. "Trust me bro, just three more months and then it'll be AGI!"
    gmerc · 1790671018 · focus · HN ↗
    You know, why don’t you actually try it yourself? It’s not my job to convince you of anything - if anything the stations of my career should give you a very uncomfortable feeling that I may actually know what I’m talking about. And I suspect that’s the very reason for your reaction, it’s really creating some serious pressure on your cognitive dissonance.
    anonymous908213 · 1790671574 · focus · HN ↗
    > why don’t you actually try it yourself?
    I literally did and posted a link to the model. Honestly, fuck off.
    This is exactly what I mean. A society of liars. Backed into a corner so all you can do is bring out another lie, pretending I didn't already do this in the conversation. If I try to bring reality into anything, you will deny what's literally right in front of you and continue living in a fantasy world of your own making, detached from any concept of proof or evidence. People like you have completely destroyed the value of public discourse. Congratulations.
    gmerc · 1790673024 · focus · HN ↗
    I think my work speaks for itself.
    [deleted] · 1790673410 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    glimshe · 1790676876 · focus · HN ↗
    Never mind that troll.
    Given your work described on this great article, how do you see a path where the LLM produces a game replication that a human could directly understand and manually improve - even if arguably unnecessary?
    Take a game like Wasteland, which has a terrible modern port. I'd be interested in creating a modern port as a hobby while manually making improvements myself. But that would require code that is reasonably modular which a human can understand. Is this possible using your method and current models?
    gmerc · 1790682670 · focus · HN ↗
    I think it’s possible, yes. RPGs are tough because they require a lot of detail but for example Ultima 6 “modernized” to Duke Nukem style 3d <a href="https://u6.tooclever.org/map3d" rel="nofollow">https://u6.tooclever.org/map3d or Syndicate or Dungeon Keeper all were no problem to do with modern models
    glimshe · 1790702447 · focus · HN ↗
    What do you mean by "because they require a lot of detail"? I assumed that most classic RPGs are an engine reading tiles and some intermediate scripting/config language for the behaviors.
    gmerc · 1790755174 · focus · HN ↗
    RPGs are much heavier on rules than other types of games and in these old games, many of them are hardcoded in the executable which means heavy RE to extract them.
    They are also usually heavier on content than other games so you have file format shenanigans like custom compression schemes or crazy memory management (see Ultima 7) to make them work / get to their internals.
    If you’re lucky they have a scripting VM that drops much of the gameplay in place (Adventures of Robin Hood for example) because you can just translate it, but many older games are a mess of data files, data embedded in the EXE and procedural rules.
    Coming from BioWare games and having contributed to making that massive complexity mess testable in the 2010:, RPGs are the hardest to test games overall because branch converge is very hard to achieve.
    If you take for example SWTOR - designers store quest variables on random animals in the world. Thoughts and prayers even for the LLM ;)
3. keeda · 1790661208 · focus · HN ↗
  I kinda guessed that he would be mistaken for an "AI booster" and tried to disclaim that in advance (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49861756">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49861756) but you really have to see his other posts; he is extremely critical of Big Tech, AI Tech Bros, and the whole AI pandemonium -- <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgzoeller/recent-activity/all/" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgzoeller/recent-activity/all...
  While he's never been dismissive of the technology itself, it is fascinating to see this kind of work from him even as he rails at all the hype around AI.
  1. simianwords · 1790666279 · focus · HN ↗
    > While he's never been dismissive of the technology itself
    Hmm,
    > Remember the relentless “AI is beating everyone in Math Olympiads” and “it’s all over for humans, no point in learning STEM? Well…
    > The 2025 Math Olympiad problems are out and naturally people tested the leading LLMs on those… and… spoiler .. they all fail, badly.
    >That’s it LLMs are all about storage in training data which enables recombinatorial retrieval. Don’t expect them to solve or respond to new things like a human.
    > They fail with novel and unknown tasks because their ability to generalize is vastly overstated by the people invested in the technology.
    > The value of LLMs is in their data. No data, no answer. You have a novel piece of work that’s never been done before? OpenAI will insist it’s worth nothing because it’s a spec in the Ocean, yet that’s not true at all.
    <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/georgzoeller_proof-or-bluff-evaluating-llms-on-2025-usa-share-7312698397910568960-XYvZ" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/posts/georgzoeller_proof-or-bluff-e...
    Today you can solve IMO problems with ~$5.
    Its up to you to verify that he has dismissed the technology and that he has been wrong about its performance in mathematics.
    Edit:
    Even without lean I can solve IMO problems using Sol/Fable today.
    You made a categorical statement about LLMs
    > That’s it LLMs are all about storage in training data which enables recombinatorial retrieval. Don’t expect them to solve or respond to new things like a human
    > They fail with novel and unknown tasks because their ability to generalize is vastly overstated by the people invested in the technology.
    It was not contextual but categorical. And it is false today.
    gmerc · 1790668538 · focus · HN ↗
    Math Olympiads benchmarks at the time were reliant on training data stuffing / Benchmaxxing and this was the absolutely correct statement at that time in that particular context (Dramatic drop of performance on out of training set questions).
    We hadn’t broadly moved into lean proof harnesses and brute force compute spend at the time yet and the statement itself continues to be true for LLMs on their own.

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