[thom]

While I do hold out hope that procedurally generated _gameplay_ takes off and increases the size of game worlds, I was more just assuming that something akin to deepfake tech could be applied to some of the rote tasks of decorating levels, doing quick first drafts of character designs etc. I'm aware this is already happening for some types of animation and rigging.

I think it's right to be ambitious in the long term though. Procedurally generated levels in 10-20 years are going to be wildly more advanced (and satisfying, and unpredictable) than now. I also wouldn't bet against award winning movie scripts in my or my kids' lifetimes.

[thom]

I also hope we're very close on good text-to-speech, which I think ought to be transformative. I have often lamented the transition from textual dialogue to voice actors, especially in RPGs, because it effectively limited the total amount of story available, and also killed of all sorts of interesting UIs that existed before based on keywords and even natural language. Coupled with something vaguely GPTish, you could have exponentially more in game flavour, leading to much deeper immersion (this coming from someone who collects all the books in Elder Scrolls games).

[somehnrdr14726]

Oh true, there's a lot of computer assisted tools for level designers and it has definitely made game worlds feel more realistic. The strategy is to let the computer generate a baseline and then hand-tune from there.

Humans aren't really good at making an area feel wild or natural... we stink up the place with hidden order. So algorithms that generate terrain, tree placement, tree shape, etc are already outperforming humans because their form of pseudorandom is more natural-feeling than our own.

I don't know how famiar you are with the industry so apologies if I'm over-explaining, but check out SpeedTree if you want to see one of these products. It's really cool.