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Comment by glimshe | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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 https://u6.tooclever.org/map3d or Syndicate or Dungeon Keeper all were no problem to do with modern models

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.

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 ;)

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