AI integration with NPC's would be interesting.

[speczero]

My son was just telling me about a mod for the game Skyrim from the Elder Scroll series of games.

He told me the mod integrated the AI ChatGPT with over 3000 of the NPC's in the game. You could literally walk up and talk to random NPC's like they were players and there were a lot of extended things you could do with them, and this is just the random no matter NPC's. The actual Group NPC's were even more versatile. He told me about one video where the player convinced one of the NPC's they were just an npc, but the npc wouldn't believe him. I don't know how he did it, but my son said the player copied the meta data on that npc and put him into the Fallout game and the NPC had a nervous breakdown in the Fallout game trying to find his family and stuff.

I was just wondering what could be done with the NPC's in City of Heroes. With AI control they could become much more interesting and also prove to be a much more challenging enemy. Also, all those random people walking around would be much more interesting in talking to or how they react to things happening. 

 

You think there is any chance of getting AI to be involved in CoH like it is in Skyrim? I know Skyrim is single player, but it would be great to get at least some AI on CoH even if it were just the higher level enemies.

Edited Sunday at 01:29 AM by speczero

[Snarky]

If only the Freakshow could have detailed conversations while i kill them…

[Techwright]

12 hours ago, speczero said:

You think there is any chance of getting AI to be involved in CoH like it is in Skyrim? I know Skyrim is single player, but it would be great to get at least some AI on CoH even if it were just the higher level enemies.

 

I think it would be based on two things:

 

1.) Whatever was in the agreement between the Homecoming leaders and NCSoft.  If there are limits on how the game can be developed, this might not even be a possibility.

2.) If the first hurdle is crossed, then it falls to volunteer development team's interest in pursuing that direction, and having the time and resources to develop it.

 

I suspect the level of A.I. you describe would ultimately prove a distraction to the core game, though some of the Role Players might like it.  If it were to ever happen, it likely would be the use of A.I. to improve the combat "skills" of the NPC opponents.  That would maintain the core game while providing an interesting new challenge.  Of course, if that were to happen, probably every NPC that can travel an elevator would be summoned at the first attack, and we'd be up against an "intelligent" flood of doom rushing the ground floor entrance.

 

 

Edited Sunday at 01:29 PM by Techwright
A minor grammatical adjustment

[BassAckwards]

1 hour ago, Techwright said:

I suspect the use of A.I. would be to improve the combat "skills" of the NPC opponents.  

 

If it doesn't improve the AI of Sister Solaris and getting her butt to the altar, then I don't want it! 🤣

[twozerofoxtrot]

Imagine....

 

Self-escorting escorts!

[Techwright]

8 hours ago, BassAckwards said:

 

If it doesn't improve the AI of Sister Solaris and getting her butt to the altar, then I don't want it! 🤣

 

That and the "I want to stop and heal every scratch" witch that we have to rescue on the Katie Hannon TF.

[Go0gleplex]

I can only dread the many 'save my cat from the tree' requests. >< 

 

Though it could be interesting if they had randomly assigned missions from the 'secret contacts (AI)' among the many crime victims on the street or strange light in the store front investigations added to the radio missions. Or if the AI was able to generate additional contact story lines. Wish list filler thoughts.... 😄

[MTeague]

See,  this is how AI would learn to hate humans, and plot to kill us all.  The AI would be trapped in some poor Atlas Park or Skyway City citizen being accosted by Hellions or Trolls, and multiple real life months would go by before a single hero would stop to help them.

[Octogoat]

Battle Becky would be her own best friend forever

[Scarlet Shocker]

11 hours ago, twozerofoxtrot said:

Imagine....

 

Self-escorting escorts!

 

That's a completely different game 🤣

[speczero]

I had my son send me a link to the Skyrim mod page. I'm gonna leave it here just to show what is possible.

 

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/126330?tab=description

[Andreah]

This game has a very old foundational architecture. I doubt it's even remotely possible for the current volunteer dev team to do any of this.

[BassAckwards]

3 minutes ago, Andreah said:

This game has a very old foundational architecture. I doubt it's even remotely possible for the current volunteer dev team to do any of this.

Agreed

 

I think the best we could hope for is using AI to help build tools that will make development of new things easier for the devs. 

[Maelwys]

Nah.

 

 

We'd end up with even worse tat than the above.

 

AI output is known as "slop" for a reason. It bears a strong resemblance to pigswill. Isolating a LLM to produce output for use by MMORPG NPCs will likely result in a regurgitated assortment of tired old Everquest and WoW tropes with no plot coherence; and if you attempt to weight it to be superhero appropriate it'll have trouble determining any difference between 60's Stan Lee paperbacks and a copy of Watchmen.

 

Besides, we already have plenty of our own Stupid Jerk Hackers around here.

(Next thing you know we'll all be Gone to the Americans...)

[Ruin Mage]

please no more ai bullshit. its bad enough in the discord and in other discords.
its a alright tool for funny shenanigans, but nothing more.

[Krimson]

37 minutes ago, Ruin Mage said:

please no more ai bullshit. its bad enough in the discord and in other discords.
its a alright tool for funny shenanigans, but nothing more.

This was covered in another thread. CoH predates APIs. There's nothing for an AI backend to hook onto. 

[TheMoneyMaker]

I think this would be a good idea for COH 2. Someone get on that.

[Techwright]

12 hours ago, MTeague said:

See,  this is how AI would learn to hate humans, and plot to kill us all.  The AI would be trapped in some poor Atlas Park or Skyway City citizen being accosted by Hellions or Trolls, and multiple real life months would go by before a single hero would stop to help them.

Or...it could just deal with the problem itself.

 

[tidge]

On 4/26/2025 at 9:26 PM, speczero said:

He told me the mod integrated the AI ChatGPT with over 3000 of the NPC's in the game. You could literally walk up and talk to random NPC's like they were players and there were a lot of extended things you could do with them, and this is just the random no matter NPC's.

 

Ah, like the OG Deus Ex?

[High_Beam]

On 4/27/2025 at 1:55 AM, twozerofoxtrot said:

Imagine....

 

Self-escorting escorts!

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.  Shhh.

[High_Beam]

Martin Henri weeps 🙂

 

Hard Pass.

[Healix]

[Skyhawke]

We don't really want Dr. Aeon gaining sentience, do we? 

[Krimson]

Even if we can figure it out using a trick like DLL injection to fake an API, the HC Team cannot just plug the game into ChatGPT. With the Skyrim mod, you are using your own OpenAI account and using OpenAI as a one-on-one service. An MMO is a different monster. Homecoming can't just pay $20 or even $200 a month and expect that to cover the token cost of AI use in the game. The amount of tokens used would be huge, and that's a lot of computing. 

 

The best way for AI to be implemented, in my opinion, would be if it was done as a client-side mod, with the player using their own OpenAI account or local LLM. But you'd first have to get it to work somehow. I use Kobold CPP which has web search, so if I want to do something like chat with Dream Doctor, I just point the LLM to the Homecoming Wiki. But game integration is another monster altogether. I'm not a programmer so if I do it, it will be via vibe coding. 😄

 

EDIT: Another option is to wait for a Language model with a large enough context to ingest the entire CoH code and rewrite it. 

Edited Monday at 02:39 PM by Krimson

[srmalloy]

17 hours ago, Maelwys said:

AI output is known as "slop" for a reason. It bears a strong resemblance to pigswill.

Why are you making denigrating comparisons about pigswill? I've abortively watched some YouTube videos that make pigswill look like Cordon Bleu -- for example, an audiobook narration of Larry Niven's Flatlander that, in the AI-created thumbnail image, stated "Flatlander is a visually stunning exploration of rural Dutch life"; another was a video that, from the title, was about the WWII Japanese amphibious light tank Type 2 Ka-Mi, but had AI illustrations of modern MBTs with the narration going on about the putative features of the K1A1 tank without once mentioning that it was a Korean tank. So far I've told YouTube to block six entire channels from recommendation because their videos are utter clickbait that seem to be determined to redefine "AI" as 'Artificial Ignorance'.