First yes the Image above is someone merging assets in to mario. If you want to listen to someone explain the basics here is a video but I will talk about it more technically.
https://youtu.be/yGkjS0gFxnY This is the bear bones panic. It won’t create new mods.
Firstly these are old games meaning things were leaked modded and have years of moder notes. The main reason why you see them all over the place is because it has so much information on how to mod about them. In reality AI was just the final step of cracking the code literally. New games like Wolverine run on 1 FPS compared to others because of that on PC.
A guy just siting on a afternoon and saying “I’m am going to make this dumb mod and flood Nexus or ModDB with low effort mods” is not gonna happen. First it costs way too much with the models they use and second it takes a long time.
So to remove all the fear and speculation I am just gonna say blatantly nothing that is talked on the internet is true it’s just fear and fearmongering.
Now I will tell you how a mod is made for Skyrim and then how mods were made for Stalker.
Skyrim has tools and a lot of available ready to download for free tools that can be used to convert Blender files and other assets in to Skyrim. It has tools to modify the base code and it has de compilers and map editors now.
The catch is AI can’t make a good asset that you can just port. best case it has a good mesh, but you still need to remodel it, because the vertices are messed up. Rigging and animation are bear bones as well. So Everything regarding armor and models needs to still be done by hand.
The code is the only thing that gets more available but even with that you need to know how code actually works. What the hell is code and what does it actually do. Their is books on C++ and even the creator of it said you don’t actually need to know the code fully to work with it. Ironically Code bases have become so bloated that you need to use AI to actually explain what the hell are you looking at.
Que valve coder notes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k238XpMMn38
Que Microsoft coder notes https://youtu.be/9dRSF1htY-4
So yes just fear mongering. Ai won’t make your mods but it makes it more available to do so. It can explain a problem and why something is happening because it understands the debugger.
Now Stalker. The X-ray engine and the Stalker code has been mith and legend for a very long time. Well not any longer because someone leaked the Xray engine partially.
The code is bad and people for a decade have been trying to figure out how to fix the game. If you add AI to the occasion it will break the game because writing “Fix code pls” isn’t really a instruction as the problems are many and a lot are even unknown because we don’t have the full code.
A-Life is so complex apparently that modern GSC can’t actually recreate it in Stalker 2.
So yeah it’s way more complex then writing “Make game pls” as a instruction. Like Name 10 AI games for example I dare you.
Honestly the bigger take away from all this IMO is the automated decompiling stuff. Like… kind of a good use case for the word guessing machine. It’s tedious but easily verifiable, kind of a perfect use case.
like being able to decompile a game to mod it more easily is cool and all, but like, that’s probably gonna be a lot more disruptive to other more significant things than video game modding.
ai wont definitely replace modding. Vibe"coders" wont have any idea what the llm churned up for them so they will have no idea how to keep it updated, improve it or generally do anything at all with the generated content. Maybe the llm can do something if prompted, but it will just mess things up slowly. I noticed this effect when i tried to make some scripts, the llm would slowly lose the plot as it “comes up” with its own brilliant ideas on how to do what i tell it to do, then it hungs up on those ideas further on and everything just becomes a big mess. Only way i could keep at least some sense in it was by copypasting the entire code for it on every prompt and that is not very sustainable. Maybe things have improved, havent cared to use llm much for long time now.
But there is another facet to all this, if we dont keep showing distain towards slop people who dont know better will start thinking its okay and vast majority of people really dont know better. And should that happen, it will make things worse by devaluing actual work people put in. What people think shapes the world. So there is still some danger of llm taking things from us, but at least we can still do something about it.
Just dont go rabid and blindly hate anything llm related as it will just discredit proper critics by association and actually support the slop.
Like Name 10 AI games for example I dare you.
I could probably find 10 just by going to recent releases on the App Store or Play Store, but I don’t really subject myself to those stores.
Anyway, on the topic of LLMs used in modding: they are. There are a lot of mods made primarily with LLMs. Having recently installed mods for several games and worked on a modding project locally while in an active modding community, there are mods that even admit on the mod page itself that it’s basically written entirely by AI.
This is usually for mods that are primarily code, though. I don’t know how prevalent AI-generated assets are, honesty.
Personally, I don’t really have an opinion on it. I’m not going to dictate to someone who I’m not paying how they should work on their own project. I may choose to avoid them if they generate their whole mod, though.
Also, in the past, I learned a lot from writing my own mods, and I only got that experience from doing it myself. It’s a shame, but people generating their mods will likely not get any of that experience themselves and will forever be dependent on LLMs as a result.
The code is the only thing that gets more available but even with that you need to know how code actually works. What the hell is code and what does it actually do. Their is books on C++ and even the creator of it said you don’t actually need to know the code fully to work with it. Ironically Code bases have become so bloated that you need to use AI to actually explain what the hell are you looking at.
Many mods for Starfield (which is Creation Engine as well, though later) are AI-generated. They generate either Papyrus or Lua (if they use SFSE) usually. Assets are another story of course, but I don’t think many of these AI-generated mod creators actually know how the code works.
I mean sure low effort mods will be created with AI but guess what they had been created before AI too.