Behold the levelling, the nihilation, of all that was once sacred. AI has taken its faux-personal tendrils and slithered them into all facets of modern life, and now it's coming for Animal Crossing, too. At least, it is if you're Josh Fonesca and take it upon yourself to replace "every line of dialogue with AI" in the beloved Nintendo title.
Fonseca explains how he "built a bridge from 2001 to today, making a vintage game console talk to a cloud-based AI without modifying a single line of the original game's code."
The villagers are central to the game and their dialogue is what makes it so special, so how does AI add anything to the already charming world? From the looks of it, this AI mod tries to keep the villagers as close to their character as possible.
The game code itself wasn't changed, but the dialogue strings within said code, of course, were. The method Josh settled upon was to use Inter-Process Communication (IPC) to write data directly into a memory address in the GameCube's RAM.
He used a bespoke Python memory scanner and "after hours of talking" to the in-game villagers and scanning, the memory addresses were found and "I could now reliably read who was talking and, more importantly, write data back to the dialogue box."
The game doesn't read plain text, however, and so inserting text into the dialogue boxes didn't work out. To get around this, he created an encoder and decoder to turn the game's special code into human-readable text and vice versa to "convert [my text] back into the exact sequence of bytes the GameCube understood."
Then AI could enter the picture. Two different AI models were used: one a dialogue writer, the other a director, adding pauses, facial expressions, and so on.
The dialogue AI was trained from a character sheet created by scraping the fan wiki. A "tiny shared memory" was added between the villagers, too: "who said what, to whom, and how they felt. Predictably, it escalated into an anti-Tom Nook movement."
Tom Nook probably deserves it, considering what he's done. If you're a Nook hater then maybe this is a way to get a bit of AI-assisted catharsis. Though, let's be honest, Animal Crossing villagers being aware of Trump and the war in Ukraine does kill most of the game's magic. Thanks AI, you've done it again...
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