I was wondering if it would be possible to have ai addition to the npcs of tower unite
No, thank you.
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Sorta maybe hijacking a little bit–because with this idea you could set it up to an OpenAI API endpoint–I think it’d be cool if the text boxes for the floating text, floating chat, NPC dialogue, global message, and maybe canvas and media player URLs could get text from a network location. Like either a file that just contains text somewhere or an API that responds when requested (like OpenAI’s). Some things this could be used for off the top of my head include:
Blabbering a list of ideas
- Have a script that gets the weather for a location and then outputs that to an endpoint, a clock item or a Timer module could trigger a Global Message module hourly which calls to that endpoint, which could give you in-game weather updates. Why you’d want this idk, maybe you’re too lazy or don’t care enough to check the weather yourself.
- You could have a webm URL that a media player is set to use that gets overwritten with different videos, and when overwriting you could have it automatically change the endpoint to respond with whatever the title for that video is and then have it be displayed in chat or on a floating text item above the entrance of a theater, so instead of manually changing the signage it could handle it automatically.
- Could potentially be obnoxious, but you could have Tower receive chat from a Discord channel, Minecraft server, or whatever has chat that’s easy to access and then make output that to an endpoint, checking it every now and posting it via Global Message and then have the server see that it was called and then reset for new messages so that those chats could be forwarded to Tower. If the dedicated server gets the ability to see local chat, which it did at one point but I think it stopped doing a few years ago, you could also have those get sent back to have cross-game/platform chat. I don’t remember if the dedicated server showed usernames for local chat though, I know it didn’t for global.
- Similar to the end of that last one, dedicated servers also would spit out output like
[2020.08.14-17.49.56:429][369]LogNet: Join succeeded: Melonplexwhen someone joined, you could uhh actually I don’t know why that’d be useful since you’re already gonna see that they joined. If we ever get some kind of string comparison logic you could have like confetti if a certain person joined or something I guess. Or if you have some kind of dedicated server network where you have multiple condos hosted, you could notify each server that someone joined based off that. So like if I’m in Dedicated Condo A and then Cornelius joins Dedicated Condo B, a script could check the log output of that and then output it to a file that is checked in Dedicated Condo A and then outputs it. - If the thing the game uses to get events from the backend were public, which I don’t have high hopes of it becoming but lets say hypothetically it were–you could have it periodically check for whatever sale is happening in the plaza whenever that’s implemented and post that in chat, so you could be like “ooh a fat deal!” and bounce out of the condo to go load up on something because I imagine plaza sales are only going to be shown when you’re in the plaza.
- If we ever got a special keyword for a players Steam ID like we have for Steam username, you could maybe have some kind of specialized response for each person? So if I have a text file at
https://example.com/npc-chat/76561198071804948.txt, and a NPC set to say respond with the text located athttps://example.com/npc-chat/%steamid%.txt, and a person whose Steam ID happens to be 76561198071804948 interacts with it, it’ll get the text from the aforementioned text file meant for that user. And then you’d have to set up something for people who don’t have a corresponding file so maybe using files is a bad idea for that but uhh just make a dinky little API for it and you’re good. - You could have it show the current time on the HUD. God forbid the Steam overlay show the time in the top left corner.
- You could have an endpoint that responds with uhhh the Fortnite item shop? I guess? People play that game and there is at least one public API for that.
- Could get the current stages for Splatoon from OatmealDome’s API, that’s information people might want to access at the push of an in-game button, I guess?
And then when interacting with NPCs, if we had the ability to use pre-selected options or custom string input, you could like fill those into a post request and do some dumb stuff with that. Which I guess could include messages to an OpenAI API allowing for back-and-forth communications if that’s the kind of thing you’re in to.
For the sake of people-can-tend-to-be-opposed-to-generative-AI, you could have an NPC that is like a stand-in for one of your friends. If we had some sort of chat box to talk to the NPC, you could take that string and post it to a JavaScript API that uses the steam-user npm package to send that message to the actual non-NPC version of that friend on Steam. Or, instead of it being a friend, you could have it be you, and have a bot account send you the messages entered in the NPC, so users can contact you if you’re not in-game. Or you could have it reach you via a Discord bot, or email, or any number of other ways you might want to be contacted that you can interact with programmatically. And then have whatever of those, the email server, Discord bot, or Steam bot take the most recent response from you and then apply that to a chat bubble (so you can see it without being in the chat UI in case they take a while to respond) so the guest can see it. So instead of an AI chat you could have an overly-convoluted chat.
You could also probably set it up to control smart lights not-too-difficultly? @darkmessenger84 set up a thing they showed off a bit in patron-only (link for those with access), where they could control their lights with IO by applying a canvas but it’d only work once per-load of the condo. Ideally this method would work more more than once per load.
Stopping it here before I get too rambly with ideas.
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Looking forward to asking Kalleira about making nitrogen pipe bombs at home 
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The typical hate on anything AI related is, as usual, regardless of platform or place, for the most part, unjustified - It’s just a new piece of technology used the exact same way for both bad AND good purposes just like every other piece of technology before it. Technology in and of itself has never hurt anyone solely by existing, and neither will it ever do so purely by existing. Now, we can argue that technology can be created FOR harming others, such as is the case with weapons and guns, at least the ones that are overly excessive such as the various tanks and all that that we have currently in the world - However, then, you are forgetting the roots and core reason for why humanity has created weaponry for in the first place, which was for survival, at least at the beginning. With that in mind, AI is no different. It wasn’t created for destruction or damage and it’s the people themselves that use it wrong, as per usual, so I do not support the overly negative take on AI just because it exists that is currently popular, and I certainly hope that it fades away soon enough and any and all issues with AI, copyright and whatever else are properly and peacefully resolved (same also going for political bias of the AI models, their tendencies to hallucinate fake and potentially harmful information and everything else related to current AI problems as well). HOWEVER - Having said all that, I can only agree to saying that while AI isn’t bad in and of itself, it would serve no good purpose for Tower’s NPCs and would most likely just feel out of place and like an addition made solely because of AI everything being popular these days. So, that’s where I stand with this.
I wrote up a big thing that kinda just became an AI rant but I think it was kinda unnecessary and overly biased. I just wanna say my main concerns with AI in this context are:
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Overall environmental cost - the energy and water usage, emissions
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the way AI as a concept is already harming peoples’ livelihoods in the writing, art, and animation industry. (Big CEOs like Jeffrey Katzenberg claiming with clear intent that AI will replace 90% of artists on big animation productions, freelance artists having their work fed into AI algorithm databases, etc.)
While my second concern is somewhat unrelated (as the topic at hand is about text generative AI), I feel like it’s completely unnecessary for AI to be used in any creative fields, and the way AI is often used currently is both unsustainable and actively harmful. I don’t think it’s unjustified to be concerned about the way new technologies are being developed and being abused immediately.
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While possible, it would be a lot more trouble than it’s worth. I doubt Tower’s developers would want to maintain it and deal with the inevitable backlash caused by a hallucinating AI when they could rather focus their efforts on more substantial game features.
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me when the sexy AI anime chatbot that calls me mommy in my condo yaps about crime statistics and has no soul and no purpose other than filling a vapid hole in my heart formed by the ever increasing social gap between people in our modern society.
Remember guys, AI is a tool that isn’t good or bad though, no massive monolithic corporations which see the human population as a set of numbers and demographics would ever exploit an new and poorly understood technology to undermine the well being of the general population for an increase in profit.
Clearly I need this GPT in my condo because why the hell would I actually want to put in creative effort? That’s what hippies do. Who cares about things like “coherency”, “context”, “human input”. Endless, overly verbose word salad spewing vague informational diarrhea cobbled together from a cosmically large database of random information is so much better than a few lines of dialogue for my tower bartender that most people are gonna walk past anyway!
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You are basically putting words right into my mouth, all while desperately trying to only comment whichever parts of my response you care enough to pay attention to. It’s somehow all about your comfort and what you would like to hear me saying, which isn’t how reality works. Not only that, people are actually supportive of you - Again, solely because of the current, unjustified hate on AI. It’s how 95% of the current opinion on AI online looks like. This isn’t just sad, but genuinely disappointing as well. Regardless, if you would have had read what I have been saying in full, you would have had noticed that I clearly stated that we do not need it. Not only that, you are actively and proudly lying about what I see AI as - And what I see it as is exactly what you have described. A tool. A tool that does not, does not need to and can not possibly posses a soul… And no, technology quite literally can not be bad by itself. The fact you are trying to convince anyone that I have said any of this tells me and everyone else here a lot about you. You said it yourself, it’s the corporations and people using it wrong, so please, stop making things up, unless you really want to make yourself look publicly worse than you already are. If you continue to make things up and put words into my mouth, then I don’t believe that we will have anything more to talk about with here.
The reason these technologies are hurting people is exactly because it’s the people themselves abusing them, including the giant corporations and overly rich CEOs. I’m not sure what’s so hard to understand about this. In addition to that, there is absolutely a place for AI in the world of art, even outside of the world of corporations abusing it - In fact, it’s already being used to generate a ton of new, never before seen pieces of artwork. Generative AI we are talking about here is a very, very big and positive thing. We just need society willing to accept it, people talking about the current issues and getting it all solved properly with laws for both sides of the problem. Ecological issues will get resolved with time, as our technologies and hardware progress. So yeah - In short, AI has a very big, bright future ahead of it in world of art. It might be mixing pre-existing works as it is now, while abusing law loopholes regarding copyright and lack of proper protective rights for artists and other people, but being this dismissive towards it just because people abuse it (including corporations) and there being no solid laws protecting artists and just rejecting it for the sake of it won’t help anyone either. It is a tool that needs embracing the potential power of, and not the hate and dismissiveness that it gets. Imagine instead, how many people are also now enabled to create new, never before seen works of art, as opposed to when they couldn’t have had done it before or would have had to struggle to do it (because of lack of time or eventually mental or physical limitations). Outside of that, It’s already here and it won’t go away. It will be like computers, smartphones, internet, writing or the wheel. I’m pretty sure that in 10 or so years, barely anyone will remember these kinds of huge, ethical and moral dilemmas about this tech and it will be simply accepted the exact same way everything else before it has been as well.
To sum things up: The current parade of hate on AI is going to become irrelevant in not that many years to come in the future and many of the current issues will be resolved. New problems will come up, same way as they do with any other technologies, but we will find a way to get around those as well. I wouldn’t put it anywhere past next 2 decades, that people can actually debate about this reasonably, instead of letting their own bias and hate fuel the “discussions” we are currently having. At the moment, people like GoopGoop here are hardly worth talking to at all, seeing the way they respond. If this continues, I will simply be leaving this topic behind and everyone involved except for the OP will be permanently ignored from now on here and in any future or past threads on the forums. Sometimes I can’t believe I’m saying it, but I have been on many Reddit threads debating AI and it’s uses in the world of art and outside of it, and people there have been much more civilized in talking about the topic, realising the massive potential that it has and how said potential is already being used by a big variety of people.
lmao i made a joke and you come in with a wall of text. i’m not reading that.
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If you do not put a disclaimer that what you are saying is a joke beforehand, a joke like this should not be told or written. If you consider it funny, I don’t know what to tell you, other than that you have a really, really distasteful sense of humor. From now on, it will be better if I simply ignore any of your next posts on the forums.
Also financial cost–I wouldn’t want PixelTail covering the API cost of that, and I doubt enough Tower users would use it enough to want to pay for it, even if it’s a fraction of a cent per token, for it to be worth implementing.
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We have no plans to add AI or OpenAI API to our game.
I can see a benefit of a HTTP get/post IO module though.
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pog
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Splendid
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