Just a quick question arising out of a few things I’ve been reading over the holidays.
Is AI (chatGPT ?) able now to respond to a request to write a script for EE? I seem to remember a previous post where the consensus seemed to be that it was “close but no cigar”!
Is that still the case or is it capable of more now? If so, how do you couch the request and maybe more importantly, has anyone had thoughts about writing a tutorial for us doubly incompetent folk who neither know how to script nor use AI ?
I’ve never asked ChatGPT to script for me, but as you’ve probably seen on Imtherealthing’s threads, he is using ChatGPT a lot (and he’s used it recently), and we’ve had to correct a lot of mistakes is has made. It does do a lot of things right, but it’s not reliable. All of a sudden you notice things that you thought were correct, and when checking in the toolset, you notice it uses functions that does not exist, or add variables to functions that are not supposed to be there. So for the time being I would advice you to try to learn some basic scripting yourself instead and go from there. It took me at least 5 years to get a basic hang of it since my brain has never been made for programming, but even I managed to learn some basic stuff eventually with A LOT of help from the community.
What I wonder is if there’s no AI that specializes in programming? I mean, ChatGPT is just about communication and language really. There ought to be better alternatives by now, but I haven’t heard of anything.
One thing I noticed when asking ChatGPT to help me with a text is that it can’t count. I wanted a line of text with X amount of syllables. It got it wrong every time, so in the end I had to fix it myself.
The best way to learn how to script is to learn the basics using the nwnlexicon stuff and then just look at existing scripts and figure out how they work and go from there. Make a small change to the fireball script, eg changing the damage amount, then try adding an additional damage type, later on you try more difficult stuff like making it only hit NPCs with blue hair etc
Seems to work best for older/stable stuff that’s had tons of stack overflows questions, forums, etc.
So while it’s not very good with nwscript as described above, if you were passed the basics it absolutely could help you design the tables / queries for sqlite3 if you want to do some persistent system.
I’d say, as far as programming goes, if you know exactly what you want and could do it yourself, even free tier of gpt can help speed things up.
Also, pasting in code and saying what’s wrong with this? can help find logical errors.
I’ve found this in my testing as well. It will include functions that you would expect to exist because similar functions do, but don’t actually exist. Something like it using GetDamageTypeFire (for example), when there is a GetDamageTypeCold (for example, I dont think that’s actually a real function) and GetDamageTypeAcid, so you’d expect TypeFire to exist, but it doesnt.
Thanks folks. I was just curious. I know a little, and I mean little, about scripting and have used SG heavily in the past but have little desire to immerse myself in learning much more.
So, what we’re looking for is an AI app built to specialize in scripting/ coding having learned the complete NWN lexicon? I suppose you could also feed it NWN scripting tutorials to enable it to hone its skills?
You’d have to think someone will be on the case somewhere, given the logical basis for scripts.
You could try Github Copilot, there are nwscript repos on there that it maybe trained against. Maybe Claude as well. It seems these LLMs just calculate nwscript to be a place where there are “magic” (i,e, not-directly specified because of nwscript.nss) functions and variables that just exist, even if you tell it not to do that.
You have to understand that writing the prompts to get what you want is a skill you need to learn too, and may well be harder than learning to write basic scripts.
A lot of people seem dubious, rightly or wrongly, in terms of gamedev/modding the impact of all this will be felt first via art assets, imo. Shame there aren’t more people around here to discuss and debate.
Pretty much every artist I have worked with is steadfastly against AI. Even if it gets better at this, most of the large models were trained on datasets without permission and frankly thus create what would be considered by law in my country copyright infringement. Every commission contract I’ve signed for TOUD or personal works has included clauses against putting the art in training datasets, or otherwise using it in AI, so it’s likely that the behaviours of these bad actors has poisoned the well.
As regards creating code, LLVMs have one very distinct flaw that trips up the unknowing, and its that it isn’t just wrong, its confidently wrong - and in the same way as people following after their favourite influencer as they have a nuclear bad take, a lot of people find this persuasive. Something to be said for the value of media literacy in this, but in the case of code, this isn’t something subjective that we can handwave as a GenAI regurgitating other people’s bad opinions. You might say that code should be easier, and I agree - the fact that it doesn’t manage this is a bitt of an indictment of just how ultimately weak these algorithms are.
(As an aside, it’s been posited AI is “here to stay” - but I’d argue it largely isn’t, in the form we presently see it. ChatGPT et al exist to defaud investors whom aren’t getting returns, just like crypto ICOs, NFTs, and so on, and when they realize they’re just holding a bag of nothing, the funding will dry up, and so will the trend)
I don’t think I’m quite as downbeat about its uses.
I can see the problem with copying without permission ( eg. Freddy Mercury singing with Elvis etc. or indeed a song he’d never sung) and in several other areas but we are in the very early stages of understanding what it could be good at,
When I first saw my school’s first Mac choosing the winner of the annual teacher’s raffle I didn’t even dream of some of the possible applications for it and suspect the same will be true of AI.
It is already starting trials in various areas of healthcare and I’m sure there will be huge benefits forthcoming in other areas.
I can also see the downside in terms of taking over jobs. A relative of mine is a bid writer and is doubtful about his future. There must also be worries in more general terms about AI for our future but they are for another place.
However, coding and scripting seem to me to be areas where it should be able to learn pretty well, even if it isn’t at the moment. It has long been my belief that games design should already be much easier.
Our toolset is brilliant but ancient. Yet I can use it pretty well. What has there been since then that has bettered it in terms of ease of usage? Possibly Unity and Unreal engine are better but both have a very steep learning curve ( deliberately so imo due to the companies involved) thereby keeping it largely the province of folks much more talented than myself.
With AI able to construct scenes on command draw on command etc surely one of the benefits eventually will be a toolset of the future where everyone can make a game, the only limitation being their imagination?