Stardock has just released the latest edition of its award-winning strategy game series and has included a new feature to assist players in creating their own civilizations. Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova is now available for early access and includes a new feature called AlienGPT that is based on OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The developer has added the tool in the newest game as a means for players to generate their own content instead of having to buy DLC content. Players need only to provide the GPT a description of their civilization and press a button. The AI will generate aliens, and quests, and even communicate with the player in their chosen language.
About AlienGPT (via Stardock Entertainment)
“GPT stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer” and since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT the world of generative AI has really taken off. For the past several months, we have been working to build GPT technology into our Tachyon engine, Stardock’s cloud-based metagaming technology that has previously been seen in Ashes of the Singularity, Offworld Trading Company and Star Control: Origins. Thanks to OpenAI’s ChatGPT API and Tachyon, we are proud to demonstrate what this technology can do for games.
AI-GENERATED CIVILIZATIONS
In the past, Stardock would release new civilizations for $4.99 for 5 as a DLC. Creating a new civilization was a lot of work. Lots of writing and lots of new art and game balance. With Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova, it’s just a matter of entering a description of your civilization and pressing a button.”
Players will be able to customize the civilizations created by the AI and even play against them. Other civilizations will interact accordingly and players can also share their creations with others online. Stardock has said that its large art library, which spans 30 years, is being used to train AI image generators. It has also clarified that even though this AI solution is being used to generate new content it does not mean that the developer is backing away from needing humans to create more content as well as provide QA for its own internally generated content.
From Stardock Entertainment:
“THE HUMAN FUTURE
Ironically, this work has resulted in us putting out the call for even more artists, writers and editors. While on the surface, this may seem counterintuitive, let me walk you through how this works out.
Before: You hire artists, writers and editors and produce N assets per month which is insufficient to be commercially viable. I.e. the consumer market just won’t pay enough to justify focusing them on these tasks.
Now: You hire artists, writers and editors and product 100N assets per month. Now it’s enough to justify the work. The stuff the AI generates is really good and getting better all the time, only a human being knows our game well enough to know whether the output fits in with what we’re trying to do.
So the short answer is, we expect to hire more artists and writers and editors in the future.”
Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova is in early access and is available on Steam or the Epic Games Store for $39.99.
Discussion (5 replies)
Join Discussion →Huh knowing what running local conversational AI requires. This is generating art assets and behavioral simple paths. I wonder what it will require in CPU and RAM.
I wonder if it isn't phoning home to a cloud system to do some of the heavy lifting. I didn't read anything to that effect but it seems like it may need some sort of online connectivity for full functionality.
Yeah that is definitely running in the cloud to generate the civilization. Once it's done your game client downloads the information like DLC.
Ehhhh... All of that compute use in the cloud would be expensive. Unless they are selling it, it makes more sense to let it run.
When I say cloud it doesn't necessarily mean it's in a cloud service such as GCP, AWS or Azure. It's probably a cluster they own which would be costly, but cheaper in the long run.
However, if it is in the cloud, then it could very well be scalable. IE: They don't pay for maximum hardware at all times. Just pay for what the service is using at that moment and if demand for resources increases, then more hardware is added sort of thing.
Either way, that's entirely too much processing to be ran locally. If you read the article you'll see where they trained the AI specifically for their game art.